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HOME  UNIVERSITY  LIBRARY 
OF  MODERN  KNOWLEDGE 

No.  64 

Editors: 

HERBERT    FISHER,  M.A.,  F.B.A. 
PROF.   GILBERT    MURRAY,  LiTT.D., 

LL.D.,  F.B.A. 

PROF.  J.  ARTHUR    THOMSON,  M.A. 
PROF.  WILLIAM   T.  BREWSTER,  M.A. 


THE  HOME  UNIVERSITY  LIBRARY 
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LITERATURE  AND  ART 

Already  Published 

SHAKESPEARE By  JOHN  MASEFIELD 

ENGLISH    LITERATURE- 
MODERN  By  G.  H.  MAIR 

LANDMARKS     IN     FRENCH 
LITERATURE By  G.  L.  STRACHEY 

ARCHITECTURE By  W.  R.  LETHABY 

ENGLISH    LITERATURE- 
MEDIEVAL  By  W.  P.  Ker 

THE    ENGLISH    LANGUAGE  .   .  By  L.  PEARSALL  SMITH 

GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS  .  By  W.  P.  TRENT  and  JOHR 

ERSKINE 

Future  Issues 

THE   WRITING    OF   ENGLISH  .   By  W.  T.  BREWSTER 
ITALIAN  ART  OF  THE  RENAIS- 
SANCE    By  ROGER  E.  FRY 

GREAT  WRITERS  OF  RUSSIA  .  By  C.  T.  HAGBERT  WRIGHT 
ANCIENT  ART  AND  RITUAL  .  By  Miss  JANE  HARRISON 
THE  RENAISSANCE By  MRS.  R.  A.  TAYLOR 


THE    LITERATURE 
OF  GERMANY 


BY 

J.  G.  ROBERTSON 

PROFESSOR    OF    GERMAN    IN    THE    UNIVERSITY 
OF    LONDON 


NEW   YORK 
HENRY   HOLT   AND    COMPANY 

LONDON 
WILLIAMS   AND   NORGATE 


r  11 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTUR  PAO» 

INTEODTTCTION  ......  7 

I    THE  MEDDLE  AGES 11 

II    THE  PERIOD  OP  THE  REFORMATION              .  37 

III  RENAISSANCE  AND  Rococo         .        .        •  62 

IV  THE  AGE  OF  CLASSIC  ACHIEVEMENT    .        •  77 
V    ROMANTICISM    ......  144 

VI    THE  POST-ROMANTIC  EPOCH       ...  188 

VII    THE  LAST  PHASE 232 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE     ....  249 

INDEX      ••••••,  253 


INTRODUCTION 

IT  is  not  perhaps  for  the  literary  vendor  to 
praise  the  wares  he  has  to  lay  before  his 
readers,  even  when,  as  in  the  present  case, 
these  wares  are  a  literature  to  which  he  only 
undertakes  to  act  as  a  guide ;  but  a  word 
might  be  said  here  in  plea  for  a  better  under- 
standing of  the  subject  to  which  the  following 
pages  are  intended  to  provide  an  introduction. 
There  is  a  certain  feeling  abroad  in  modern 
England — a  feeling  which  was,  however,  not 
shared  by  older  generations — that  the  litera- 
ture of  Germany  is  of  subordinate  value,  that 
it  is  less  worthy  of  study  than  other  modern 
literatures  ;  that  it  possesses  a  more  limited 
range  of  immortal  works  essential  to  the 
general  culture  of  mankind.  This  is  noticeable 
in  the  small  output  of  books  dealing  with 
German  poetry  in  England,  in  the  inferiority 
of  our  English  translations  from  the  German 
compared  with  those  from  the  French,  Italian 
and  Spanish ;  in  the  consequent  neglect  of 
even  the  masterpieces  of  this  literature  in 


8  INTRODUCTION 

our  many  collections  of  universal  literature 
for  popular  consumption,  and  in  our  general 
ignorance  of  what  the  Germans  are  thinking 
and  doing  in  the  world  of  letters. 

Comparisons  between  one  literature  and 
another  are  difficult  and  not  always  desirable  ; 
we  do  not  propose  to  infringe  on  the  province 
of  individual  or  national  taste  by  trying  to 
institute  any  such  here.  Nor  do  we  wish  to 
dispute  the  fact  that  German  literary  history 
presents  a  record  of  broken  and  often  un- 
realised endeavour  ;  that  its  development  is 
irregular  as  that  of  no  other  modern  litera- 
ture in  Europe ;  that  its  appeal  in  even  its 
best  works  is  frankly  a  national  one  rather 
than  a  cosmopolitan  one.  But  there  is  one 
claim  we  would  make  for  this  literature,  a 
claim  which  this  little  book  will  try  to  justify, 
namely,  that  German  literature  is  an  essen- 
tially modern  literature  ;  by  which  we  mean 
that,  in  its  entire  range,  from  early  mediaeval 
times  onwards,  it  is  in  peculiarly  close  touch 
with  the  thinking  and  feeling  of  to-day.  The 
reason  for  this  quality  is  to  be  sought  in  the 
overweening,  even  one-sided,  individualism 
of  German  poetic  art ;  it  deals  more  per- 
sistently and  constantly  with  the  individual 
human  soul  than  with  the  external  world; 


INTRODUCTION  9 

it  is  essentially  subjective.  German  mediaeval 
poetry  may  not  be  as  successful  in  making 
"  the  golden  Middle  Age  gorgeous  upon  earth 
again  "  as  other  mediaeval  literatures  ;  but 
it  gives  us  more  penetrating  glimpses  into  the 
inner  life  of  the  denizen  of  the  Middle  Ages, 
and  thereby  awakens  a  sympathetic  interest  in 
the  modern  reader.  Its  interpretation,  again, 
of  that  great  new-birth  which  we  associate  with 
the  word  Reformation  appears  in  the  still 
modern  form  of  a  liberation  of  the  individual 
from  a  world  that  took  no  stock  of  individuals. 
Lastly,  the  great  German  literature  of  the 
eighteenth  century  deals  constantly  with 
problems,  ethic  as  well  as  aesthetic,  which  are 
as  vital  and.  real  to  us  to-day  as  they  were 
to  that  far-off  time.  We  have  to  accept 
frankly  the  comparative  absence  of  the 
formal  beauty  which  tne  Latin  peoples  of 
Europe  can  point  to  in  their  literatures ; 
Germany  has  no  Dante,  Ariosto  or  Tasso ;  no 
Lope  de  Vega  ;  no  Corneille  or  Moliere  ;  but, 
on  the  other  hand,  her  essential  contribution, 
to  the  wealth  of  the  world's  imagination 
has  always  centred  in  the  interpretation  of 
heart  and  soul.  Her  literature,  in  spite  of  its 
broken  endeavour,  its  fragmentary  incomplete- 
ness, possesses  in  this  universal  subjectivity  a 


10  INTRODUCTION 

perennial  fascination  ;  it  realises  the  dream 
of  her  great  Romantic  thinkers  at  the  begin- 
ning of  last  century  of  a  universal  poetry  ; 
it  links  up  the  Middle  Ages  with  modern  times  ; 
reveals,  by  virtue  of  its  preoccupation  with 
the  psychical  and  the  emotional,  the  common 
humanity  that  binds  the  European  of  to-day 
with  his  ancestors  far  back  in  the  darker  ages. 
It  is  thus  less  supreme  beauty  of  expression 
that  we  have  to  look  for  in  the  great  poets  of 
the  German  past,  than  that  modern  affinity, 
which  makes  Wolfram  von  Eschenbach  and 
Walther  von  der  Vogelweide  the  most  modern 
of  mediaeval  poets,  that  brings  Luther  into  line 
with  the  commanding  personalities  of  more 
recent  times,  that  makes  Lessing  a  critic  of 
our  own  day  and  Goethe  still  a  modern  poet. 


THE    LITERATURE    OF 
GERMANY 


CHAPTER   I 

THE   MIDDLE   AGES 

IT  is  customary  for  the  literary  historians  who 
describe  the  earliest  phases  of  German  in- 
tellectual life,  to  distinguish  two  periods  in 
mediaeval  literature  which,  following  the 
nomenclature  adopted  for  the  corresponding 
stages  in  the  development  of  the  German 
language,  they  call  Old  High  German  and 
Middle  High  German.  The  first  of  these 
periods,  which  extended  from  about  the 
middle  of  the  eighth  to  about  the  middle  of 
the  eleventh  centuries,  may  be  disposed  of 
here  in  comparatively  few  words.  The  truth 
is  that  the  particular  race  of  Germanic  peoples 
with  which  we  have  to  deal,  was  exceed- 
ingly backward  in  its  intellectual  development. 
Other  members  of  the  great  Germanic  family 
made  much  more  rapid  progress.  The  Goths, 
11 


12  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

for  instance,  who  had  settled  in  the  south- 
east, on  the  Danube,  as  early  as  the  fourth 
century,  possessed  a  remarkable  translation 
of  at  least  part  of  the  Bible  into  their  own 
tongue,  the  work  of  their  famous  bishop 
Ulphilas  or  Wulfila ;  and  the  Germanic 
races  that  immigrated  into  our  own  island, 
were  intellectually  more  advanced  than  their 
continental  cousins.  Even  the  Low  German 
tribes  in  the  north  of  the  continental  area, 
showed  themselves  capable  of  having  their 
imagination  stirred  at  an  earlier  date  than  the 
High  Germans  of  the  south.  In  fact,  if  we 
were  to  remove  from  the  record  of  early 
German  poetry  the  quota  contributed  by 
the  Low  Germans,  what  is  left  would  be  of 
very  little  value  indeed.  Old  High  German 
literature  consists  in  great  part  of  mere 
translations  of  the  Church  liturgy,  of  prayers, 
fragments  of  sermons  and  similar  aids  to 
the  religious  life.  Even  poems  which  earlier 
scholars  used  to  think  showed  traces  of  an 
earlier,  pre-Christian  imagination,  are  now 
more  rightly  judged  to  owe  their  embellish- 
ments to  monkish  variants  of  familiar  Biblical 
imagery.  The  most  considerable  monument 
of  Old  High  German  verse  is  the  Gospel  Book 
of  Otfrid,  of  the  ninth  century,  the  first 


THE    MIDDLE    AGES  13 

German  poem  in  rhymed,  as  opposed  to 
alliterating,  verse ;  it  is,  however,  tedious 
and  didactic,  and  confuses  the  simple  story  of 
the  life  of  Christ  by  superimposing  subtle, 
scholastic  interpretations  upon  it. 

The  real  poetry  of  this  early  twilight  of 
the  German  mind  is  to  be  sought  amongst 
the  Low  Saxon  tribes  of  the  north.  To  these 
Saxons  we  owe  an  alliterative  verse  translation 
of  the  Bible,  of  which  the  largest  section 
preserved  to  us  is  a  life  of  Christ,  the  so-called 
Heliand  or  Saviour.  There  is  in  this  old  poem 
a  vivid  sense  of  reality  ;  for  the  poet  possessed 
the  gift,  rare  in  those  days,  of  seeing  the 
world  which  he  transferred  to  his  poem, 
with  his  own  eyes ;  he  was  able  to  interpret 
the  happenings  of  the  far-off  eastern  story,  as 
if  it  were  being  enacted  again  before  him,  and 
in  the  rude  surroundings  of  his  own  home. 
In  addition  to  this  naive  realism,  the  poet  of 
the  Heliand  had  something  more  than  a  mere 
memory  of  the  pre-Christian  traditions  of  the 
Germanic  peoples ;  Christ  in  his  eyes  has 
become  a  veritable  Germanic  hero.  With  all 
its  interest,  however,  the  Heliand  must  yield 
to  another  fragment  of  this  early  time,  which 
owes  its  preservation  at  least  to  Low  German 
tradition.  This  is  the  Hildebrandslied,  or 


14  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

Lay  of  Hildebrand,  in  which,  almost  for  the 
only  time,  we  catch  a  glimpse  of  the  primitive 
German  spirit  before  the  coming  of  Christian- 
ity ;  in  this  brief  fragment  of  an  old  heroic 
story — describing  how  a  father  returns  from 
long  years  of  exile  and  is  obliged  to  engage  in 
combat  with  a  son  who  obstinately  refuses  to 
recognise  him,  we  have  a  splendid  testimony 
to  the  poetic  imagination  of  the  Germans  in 
that  rough,  primitive  time  before  it  was 
chastened  and  mellowed  by  the  influence  of 
Christianity 

To  find  the  vital  literature  of  these  dark 
centuries  we  have  to  turn  not  merely  to 
Saxon  literary  monuments,  but  also  to  Latin. 
That  blotting-out  of  the  vernacular  which 
accompanied  the  ascendancy  of  the  mediaeval 
Church,  was  more  conspicuous  in  Germany 
than  elsewhere.  The  dynasty  of  the  Saxon 
emperors — Heinrich  I.,  the  three  Ottos  and 
Heinrich  II.,  in  whose  hands  the  fortunes  of 
the  German-speaking  world  lay  for  over  a 
century  (919-1024) — withdrew  the  enlightened 
encouragement  of  the  use  of  the  mother-tongue, 
which  characterised  Charles  the  Great  and  his 
successors  Ludwig  the  Pious  and  Ludwig  the 
German,  and,  from  the  whole  tenth  century, 
the  darkest  of  all  the  dark  ages  as  far  as 


THE    MIDDLE   AGES  15 

Germany  was  concerned,  we  hardly  possess 
a  line  written  in  the  German  tongue.  The 
only  visible  sign  of  continuity  in  the  literary 
tradition  is  to  be  seen  in  the  work  of  men 
who  wrote  in  Latin.  Prominent  among  such 
writings  are  The  Lay  of  Waliharius,  a  polished 
epic  by  a  monk,  Ekkehard  of  St.  Gall,  of  the 
story,  which  is  also  to  be  found  in  early  English 
literature,  of  Walther  and  Hildegund ;  the 
Ecbasis  Captivi  (The  Escape  of  the  Captive), 
the  earliest  verson,  written  in  Lorraine,  of  the 
Beast  Epic,  that  vivid,  realistic  form  of 
allegory  which  was  to  play  a  large  role  in 
later  mediaeval  literature ;  and  lastly,  one  of 
the  earliest  of  European  romances,  Ruodlieb, 
in  which  there  is  some  intimation  of  a  return  to 
a  healthy  joy  in  living,  and  a  delight  in  action 
and  adventure.  Ruodlieb  is  a  forerunner  of 
the  vast  body  of  European  romance  which 
flourished  under  the  influence  of  chivalry. 

We  can  hardly  say  that  there  was  any  very 
clear  connection  between  the  sparing  literary 
remains  of  this  early  period  and  its  political 
history.  The  great  age  of  Charles  the  Great 
left  hardly  a  trace  on  his  own  people  ;  and  its 
echo  in  later  times  in  Germany  was  faint 
and  reflected  compared  with  the  enthusiastic 
hero-worship  with  which  this  monarch,  as 


16  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

Charlemagne,  was  regarded  in  the  land  of  the 
Western  Franks.  Still  less  did  the  later 
Carlovingians  mean  to  German  poetry,  and 
the  Saxon  emperors,  with  their  exotic  and 
Byzantine  tastes,  meant  least  of  all.  The 
real  denning  force  in  literature  in  those 
early  days  was  the  Church ;  literature  was 
the  immediate  product  of  the  monastery  in 
so  far  as  the  art  of  writing  was  practically 
limited  to  the  monks,  these  being  the  only 
members  of  the  community  who  could  read 
and  write.  How  serious  a  disadvantage  this 
could  be  for  literature  is  seen  at  the  outset 
of  the  new  period  of  German  literature  in  the 
eleventh  century,  when  the  Old  High  German 
speech  had  given  place  to  that  simpler  modi- 
fication we  know  as  Middle  High  German  ;  for 
with  the  rise  of  the  Cistercian  order  of  monks, 
Europe  was  at  the  mercy  of  a  rigid,  pessi- 
mistic asceticism,  which  fell  like  a  blighting 
night-frost  on  the  tender  new-growths  of 
secular  poetry.  "  Remember  death,"  "  re- 
nounce the  joys  of  life  "  was  the  eternal  cry, 
and  it  was  reiterated  in  a  wide  variety  of 
forms  through  all  the  literature  of  the  time. 
Gradually,  however,  as  the  eleventh  cen- 
tury moved  on,  the  secular  spirit  began  to  free 
itself ;  the  grip  of  the  Church  relaxed.  Care- 


THE    MIDDLE    AGES  17 

less,  wandering  singers,  "  Spielleute  "  as  the 
Germans  call  them,  brought  back  to  life  the 
old-world  stories  that  had  lived  on  in  oral 
tradition  through  all  the  vicissitudes  of  the 
dark  ages,  stories  of  early  German  heroes 
that  had  come  down  from  the  heroic  time 
when  German  and  Hun  stood  face  to  face 
in  the  "  Volkerwanderung  "  or  "  Migrations," 
that  terrible  struggle  for  national  existence 
in  the  fifth  century.  These  new  poets,  too, 
discovered  that  the  Bible  was  not  all  gloom 
and  renunciation ;  they  found  in  it  stories 
which  responded  to  a  lighter  vein  in  their  own 
hearts,  and  these  they  told  over  again  in  their 
own  way.  But  of  all  the  liberating  forces  in 
this  age  the  greatest  was  that  of  the  Crusades, 
which,  beginning  in  the  last  years  of  the 
eleventh  century,  gave  Europe  a  spiritual  ideal 
which  maintained  its  preeminence  until  after 
the  middle  of  the  thirteenth ;  the  Crusades 
opened  up  a  new  world,  satisfying  alike  to 
the  spiritual  and  the  temporal  ambitions  of  the 
age,  and  appealing  with  extraordinary  force 
to  the  imagination  of  Northern  Europe. 

And  in  the  train  of  the  Crusades  came  chi- 
valry, which  inaugurated  an  era  of  cosmo- 
politanism in  the  thought  and  poetry  of 
Europe,  a  devotion  to  one  ideal  of  perfect 


18   THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

knighthood  to  which  the  whole  Christian 
world  paid  equal,  fervid  homage.  Rapidly, 
with  these  new  humanising  forces,  a  mellower 
light  spread  over  German  literature.  Asceti- 
cism gave  place  to  a  love  of  knightly  ad- 
venture, the  melancholy  drab  of  the  monkish 
poetry  became  suffused  with  a  lyric,  religious 
mysticism  ;  the  oriental  wonders,  of  which  the 
early  Crusaders  brought  back  highly-coloured 
reports,  kindled  the  imagination  of  the  people. 
The  wandering  "  Spielmann  "  became  a  factor 
of  importance  in  literature  and  made  an 
appeal  to  the  people  such  as  no  monk  ever 
could  have  made. 

As  the  eleventh  century  approached  its 
close  an  exceedingly  varied  literature  began  to 
be  written  in  the  German  vernacular.  Tales 
of  adventures  in  the  East,  like  King  Bother,  or 
— still  more  flamboyant  in  its  orientalism — 
the  story  of  Herzog  Ernst,  and  the  Lay  of 
Alexander,  the  latter,  a  theme  which  already 
enjoyed  popularity  in  France,  were  eagerly 
listened  to  by  German  audiences ;  from 
France  came,  too,  at  this  time  the  beginnings 
of  a  form  of  mediaeval  romance  which  was 
to  become  in  a  peculiar  degree  the  mirror  of 
polite  life,  the  Arthurian  epic.  Even  more 
interesting  was  the  early  development,  under 


THE   MIDDLE   AGES  19 

Proven£al  influence,  of  the  national  German 
lyric,  or  "  Minnesang,"  and  the  revival  of 
the  sagas  of  the  Migrations  in  the  Heroic  or 
Popular  Epic. 

Thus,  within  a  miraculously  brief  space  of 
time,  we  find  Germany — this  Germany  which, 
a  little  over  a  century  before,  could  hardly 
point  to  a  single  German  poem — in  the  midst  of 
a  poetic  renaissance  of  vast  promise.  With 
the  closing  years  of  the  twelfth  century  sets 
in  the  first  great  epoch  in  German  poetry, 
the  so-called  "  Middle  High  German  Flourish- 
ing Period "  ;  and  this  flourishing  period 
synchronised  closely  with  the  great  age  of 
the  Hohenstaufen  emperors  who,  between 
Konrad  III.'s  election  to  the  Imperial  throne 
in  1138  and  Konradin's  death  in  1268,  raised 
the  German  people  to  a  dominating  position 
in  Europe.  It  seems  a  pity  that  in  our  latter- 
day  histories  of  German  literature  this  con- 
nection, on  which  the  older  Romantic  critics 
laid  such  weight,  is,  to  a  large  extent,  lost 
sight  of.  Possibly  it  is  only,  as  the  scientific 
historian  will  have  it,  a  fanciful  one ;  but 
even  if  the  connection  does  not  admit  of 
scientific  proof,  it  may  be  accepted  as  an  indi- 
cation of  hidden  forces  acting  together  which 
somehow  render  poetic  vigour  and  political 


20  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

power  synchronous  in  the  history  of  nations. 
It  is  true,  there  is  but  little  actual  reflection 
of  German  contemporary  history  in  Middle 
High  German  literature  ;  the  great  poets  tell 
only  of  idealised  heroes,  of  warriors  of  a  long 
past  age ;  the  lyric  is  only  in  a  small  degree 
enlisted  in  the  service  of  national  ideas, 
and  is  then  taken  up  with  party  quarrels  and 
trivial  happenings  rather  than  with  the  real 
glory  of  the  mediaeval  empire  under  Hohen- 
staufen  rule ;  but  none  the  less,  or  perhaps 
for  that  reason  all  the  more,  the  same  vigorous, 
self-confident  life  appears  alike  in  poetry  and 
in  statesmanship.  The  great  age  of  German 
mediaeval  poetry,  which  broke  over  Germany 
with  such  extraordinary  suddenness  at  the 
turn  of  the  twelfth  and  thirteenth  centuries, 
is  rightly  associated  with  the  ascendancy 
of  the  Hohenstaufen  dynasty.  As  a  matter 
of  fact,  it  was  not  in  the  nature  of  mediaeval 
poetry  to  take  constant  account  of  national 
movements  or  actual  political  life ;  for  the 
art  of  literature  itself  was  something  of  ao 
abstraction,  an  idealisation  that  purposely 
left  the  realities  aside.  None  the  less,  the 
festival,  which  Barbarossa  (Frederick  I.) 
held  at  Mainz  in  1184,  was  a  landmark  in 
the  development  of  mediaeval  song;  and 


THE   MIDDLE   AGES  21 

although  Barbarossa  himself  leaves  little 
impress  on  the  poetry  of  his  contemporaries, 
his  appeal  to  their  fantasy  is  vouched  for  by 
the  halo  of  romantic  traditions  that  clung 
so  long  to  his  memory. 

The  scope  of  this  little  book  precludes 
any  very  close  study  of  this  age ;  we  can 
only  look  at  a  few  typical  representatives  of 
its  poetry.  Middle  High  German  literature 
falls,  roughly  speaking,  into  three  clearly 
marked  groups  :  the  Court  Epic,  or  Epic  of 
Knighthood,  built  up  for  the  most  part  on 
matters  that  came  by  way  of  France  from 
Britain — the  stories  of  King  Arthur  and  his 
knights  ;  the  National  or  Popular  Epic,  which 
deals  with  themes  drawn  from  the  ancient 
sagas  that  had  come  down  from  the  far  distant 
epoch  of  the  Migrations  ;  and  the  lyric,  or 
Minnesang.  In  the  first  group  of  poetry, 
the  Court  Epic,  there  stand  out  three  great 
poets,  Hartmann  von  Aue,  Wolfram  von 
Eschenbach  and  Gottfried  von  Strassburg. 
These  men  were  the  exact  contemporaries 
of  one  another,  and  lived  at  the  end  of  the 
twelfth  and  beginning  of  the  thirteenth  cen- 
turies. In  their  principal  works  they  all 
"  translated,"  although  in  a  wide  and  liberal 
sense  of  that  word,  the  stories  of  the  Arthurian 


cycle,  that  "  matter  of  Britain  "  which  had 
already  been  crystallised  into  soul-stirring 
romances  by  French  poets  like  Chretien  de 
Troyes.  It  is  obvious  to  every  student  of 
mediaeval  literature  that  we  cannot,  in  estimat- 
ing this  literature,  employ  the  criteria  appli- 
cable to  modern  periods.  For  the  whole  rela- 
tion of  the  mediaeval  poet  to  poetry,  the 
relation  of  his  personal  individuality  to  his 
poetic  individuality — if,  indeed,  any  poet 
of  the  pre-Renaissance  epoch  can  be  said  to 
have  possessed  individuality  in  the  modern 
meaning  of  the  word  at  all — was  different. 
Hartmann,  Wolfram  and  Gottfried  may  only, 
as  we  have  said,  have  "  translated,"  but  just 
in  the  form  and  manner  of  their  translations 
lay  their  poetic  mission.  In  a  nai've,  un- 
conscious way,  due  frankly  to  the  want 
of  any  training  in  their  art,  they  bring  the 
poetic  matter  of  another  race  into  touch  with 
a  reality  based  on  their  own  experience. 
It  never  occurs  to  them,  as  it  would  to  a 
modern  translator,  to  respect  the  rights  of 
their  originals  ;  the  story  must,  at  all  costs, 
be  brought  into  agreement  with  the  poet's 
own  personal  conviction,  and  in  doing  so, 
he  has  no  hesitation  in  altering  the  matter 
he  translates.  Thus  the  personal  note — 


THE    MIDDLE   AGES  23 

keeping  in  view  the  peculiar  limitations  of 
mediaeval  personality — is  always  present; 
translation  or  no  translation,  this  poetry 
affords  us  a  real  insight  into  the  constitution 
of  the  German  thirteenth-century  mind. 

Of  the  three  poets  whose  names  have  been 
mentioned,  Hartmann  makes  perhaps  the 
least  cogent  appeal  to  the  modern  mind.  He 
is  an  artist  whose  peculiar  power  is  to  be 
sought  in  qualities  of  form  and  style,  qualities 
in  which  the  French  poets  of  the  same  age 
had  shown  him  the  way,  and  in  some  respects 
overshadowed  him.  His  Erec  and  Iwein  are 
transferences  to  the  German  milieu  of  an  art 
that  had  been  perfected  in  France  ;  and  these 
poems  taught  the  German  poets  a  lesson 
in  style  of  inestimable  value.  Hartmann's 
temperament — he  was,  no  doubt,  a  little  in- 
clined to  melancholy  and  deeply  influenced  by 
the  monastic  fatalism  of  his  Church — appears 
more  clearly  in  his  non- Arthurian  poetry,  his 
lyrics,  his  delightful  idyll,  in  many  respects 
the  most  beautiful  of  the  German  Middle 
Ages,  Der  arme  Heinrich,  and  in  his  severely 
ecclesiastic  legend  of  Gregorius. 

Hartmann  is  the  finest  artist  of  the  three, 
but  both  Wolfram  and  Gottfried  are  greater 
poets  and  more  interesting  personalities. 


24  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

From  Wolfram's  epic  Parzival  we  learn,  as 
from  no  other  European  work  of  its  age,  the 
attitude  of  the  pre-Renaissance  mind  to 
religion,  the  naive  realism  and  childlike 
simplicity  with  which  the  mediaeval  soul 
faced  the  problems  of  Christianity.  The 
spiritual  aspiration  of  the  "  guileless  fool  " 
Parzival,  on  his  pilgrimage  through  life,  is 
transfused  by  Wolfram  with  a  suggestive  and 
romantic  allegory ;  the  poet's  unbridled  imagi- 
nation runs  riot  in  describing  the  mystic  castle 
and  ceremonies  of  the  Holy  Gral,  and  these 
leave  on  us  moderns  an  impression  hardly  less 
awe-inspiring  than  that  which  they  left  on  the 
open-mouthed,  staring  hero  himself,  who  is 
so  overpowered  by  all  he  sees  and  hears  that 
he  forgets  to  put  the  little  question  of  sym- 
pathy with  human  suffering  which  would  have 
solved  the  riddle  of  the  Gral.  In  Parzival 
Wolfram  has  painted  for  us  the  perfect  knight, 
in  whom  the  worldly  and  the  unworldly — 
two  opposites  which  had  been  blended  in  the 
ideal  of  the  Crusades — are  united  in  perfect 
harmony  ;  and  in  this  perfect  knight,  who 
through  doubt  and  despair  rises  to  a  higher 
life,  we  recognise  a  type  of  manhood  that  is 
not  mediaeval  alone,  but  is  to  be  found  again 
in  modern  literature.  In  the  problem  which 


THE   MIDDLE   AGES  25 

his  hero  has  to  face  lies  the  "  present-day  " 
element  in  Wolfram  von  Eschenbach. 

If  Wolfram  shows  the  relation  of  the 
mediaeval  mind  to  its  spiritual  problems,  we 
might  claim  Gottfried's  poem  as  an  elucidation 
of  the  dealings  of  that  mind  with  moral  and 
social  problems.  On  the  surface  perhaps  this 
does  not  seem  to  be  so.  Gottfried's  Tristan 
is  a  love  story,  the  most  passionate  love  story 
of  the  Middle  Ages  ;  and  it  might  seem  as  if, 
so  far  from  being  a  moral  discussion  of  the 
theme,  it  is  characterised  by  a  persistent 
avoidance  of  all  that  we  moderns  regard  as 
a  desirable  moral  standpoint.  In  fact,  there 
is  no  moral  law  for  Gottfried ;  he  stands 
"  beyond  good  and  evil "  ;  he  tells  his  story 
with  the  sheer  delight  of  telling  it,  regardless 
of  all  moral  consequences  or  lessons.  But 
just  this  lack  of  a  sophisticated  moral  code 
makes  it  the  easier  for  us  to  get  at  the  real  bed- 
rock of  human  morality  below  the  surface. 
Tristan  is  a  moral-less  tale,  but  a  tale  which 
just  thereby  carries  with  it  its  own  deep  moral. 
The  blight  of  an  almost  modern  fatalism  falls 
on  these  two  unhappy  lovers,  who  have  drunk 
the  fatal  potion  that  brings  them  into  clash 
with  society,  and  holds  them  by  a  passion 
that  ultimately  overwhelms  them. 


26  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

To  this  age  belongs  also  the  great  national 
epic  of  the  German  peoples,  the  Nibelungenlied  ; 
it  is  the  chief  example  of  the  second  class 
of  narrative  poetry  which  we  have  dis- 
tinguished in  Middle  High  German  literature. 
The  modern  reader  is  at  first  inclined  to  place 
the  Nibelungenlied  in  a  very  different  category 
from  those  poems  we  have  just  been  consider- 
ing. Outwardly  it  is  very  different ;  it  is 
no  story  of  polite  Arthurian  chivalry  ;  even 
the  very  form,  the  kind  of  verse  in  which  it 
is  written,  is  different ;  and  there  is  a  funda- 
mental difference  between  the  matter  of  the 
two  types  of  epic.  The  author's  or  authors' 
name  we  do  not  know  ;  and  indeed  the  need  of 
knowing  does  not  seem  very  urgent ;  there  is 
so  little  tangible  personality  behind  the  poem. 
One  feels  that  there  is,  so  to  speak,  less  gap, 
between  the  present  epic  and  its  original  basis 
than  there  is  between  the  German  adaptations 
of  the  Court  Epic  and  their  original  forms. 
In  comparison  with  the  Arthurian  stories, 
the  splendid  barbarism  of  the  Nibelungenlied 
seems  infinitely  old ;  the  events  here  des- 
cribed gave  the  impression  of  having  taken 
place  far  back  in  the  past ;  and  to  its  con- 
temporaries it  must  have  made  an  impression 
similar  to  that  which  is  left  on  modern 


THE    MIDDLE   AGES  27 

readers  when  a  poet  of  to-day  deals,  say,  with 
a  theme  from  the  time  of  the  Crusades.  The 
stories  of  Parzival  and  Tristan  are,  as  it  were, 
brought  up  to  date ;  the  Nibelungenlied, 
on  the  other  hand,  remains  essentially  the 
simple,  primitive  epic  of  Siegfried,  an  ancient 
hero  of  the  Netherlands,  who,  in  a  far  back  age, 
won  the  sister  of  King  Gunther  of  the  Bur- 
gundians  as  his  wife,  and  assisted  Gunther  to 
win,  on  his  part,  Brunhild,  the  super-human, 
half-supernatural  queen  of  Iceland,  for  his  ; 
who  fell  a  victim  to  Brunhild's  revenge  and  to 
a  treachery  due  to  Hagen's  unflinching  loyalty 
to  his  master,  Gunther  ;  and  whose  murder 
was  ultimately  avenged  by  terrible  bloodshed. 
Even  the  mythical  elements  shimmer  occasion- 
ally through,  and  betray  the  original  connec- 
tion of  the  story  with  the  mythological  beliefs 
of  those  who  first  conceived  it.  Our  impres- 
sion, in  fact,  of  this  poem  is  of  a  thing  essenti- 
ally old,  which  has  been  only  partially  modern- 
ised by  the  introduction  of  a  gentler  religious 
faith  and  the  politeness  of  the  age  of  chivalry. 
The  strength  of  the  Nibelungenlied  lies  not  in 
these  finer  graces,  but  in  the  primitive  elements 
of  its  story ;  it  has  the  stamp  of  veracity  on  it, 
such  as  long  years  of  tradition  alone  give  to  a 
work,  an  inevitableness  as  of  some  cataclysm 


28  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

beyond  human  control.  There  is  no  tragedy 
in  mediaeval  literature  which  awakens  more 
pity  than  the  death  of  Siegfried,  unless  it  be 
that  of  him  who  died  in  Roncesvaux  ;  no 
catastrophe  more  awe-inspiring  than  the 
terrible  close  of  the  Nibelungenlied,  in  which 
a  ruthless,  avenging  nature  wipes  out,  as  it 
were,  the  petty  attempt  of  man  to  assert 
himself  in  opposition  to  her  eternal  laws. 

The  poems  we  have  just  been  looking  at  are 
representative  of  a  vast  narrative  literature  in 
this  age.  The  Arthurian  epics  bulk  quite  as 
largely  in  German  literature  as  in  French 
literature,  and  as  time  went  on,  they  increased 
in  length,  and,  unfortunately,  also  deteriori- 
ated  in  quality.  Few  poems,  outside  those  of 
the  three  leading  poets,  are  generally  read 
nowadays,  except,  it  may  be,  one  or  two  of 
the  shorter  idylls  of  Konrad  von  Wiirzburg, 
such  as  his  Herzemare  (The  Story  of  the  Heart), 
or  a  poem  like  Wernher's  Meier  Helmbrecht 
(Farmer  Helmbrecht),  which,  in  elevating  an 
evil-living  peasant  to  the  position  of  the  hero, 
becomes  almost  a  parody  of  chivalric  romance. 
The  national  epic  poetry,  apart  from  the 
Nibelungenlied,  is  likely  to  be  more  attractive 
to  the  reader  of  to-day.  Gudrun,  for  instance, 
is  a  delightful  epic  of  the  sea,  which,  in  parts, 


THE    MIDDLE    AGES  29 

at  least,  appeals  to  the  modern  imagination 
with  something  of  the  power  of  the  Nibelungen- 
lied  ;  and  some  of  the  individual  poems  of 
the  Heldenbuch,  as  the  collection  of  epics  on 
popular  sagas  is  called,  contain,  especially  in 
their  faery  lore,  elements  of  enduring  poetry. 

Of  the  great  lyric  poetry  of  the  thirteenth 
century  it  is  less  necessary  here  to  plead  for 
sympathetic  understanding  on  the  part  of  the 
modern  reader.  Walther  von  der  Vogelweide 
is  a  lyric  poet  whom  everyone,  sensitive 
to  the  lyric  throb,  recognises  at  once  as 
one  of  the  elect  lyric  singers  of  the  world. 
And  Walther  was  only  one  of  a  large  group 
of  Minnesingers  who  filled  the  thirteenth 
century  with  song.  His  predecessors,  whom 
German  fancy  has  described  as  constituting  the 
"  spring-time  of  the  Minnesang,"  the  pioneers 
who  first  turned  the  rich  stream  of  lyric  in- 
spiration from  the  South  of  France  across  Ger- 
man lands,  and  gave  the  vague  lyric  inspiration 
of  the  German  people  a  form  and  a  polish 
which  it  could  assuredly  not  have  attained  so 
rapidly,  had  it  been  left  to  itself,  have  no  less 
urgent  claim  on  our  attention.  Interesting, 
too,  are  the  later  developments  of  the  lyric 
after  Walther's  time,  the  gradual  petrifaction 
of  the  higher  court  lyric,  on  the  one  hand,  and 


30  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

the  fusion  of  the  lower,  more  natural  forms  of 
lyric  with  the  "  Volkslied  "  to  swell  the  main 
current  of  national  poetry.  But  in  a  higher 
degree  than  is  true  of  any  one  poet  of  the 
Court  Epic  in  respect  of  narrative  poetry, 
Walther  von  der  Vogelweide  sums  up  in 
himself  the  lyric  of  his  century.  He  is  not 
only  the  most  inspired  poet  of  his  time, 
but  he  is  also  the  poet  whose  range  of  ex- 
pression is  widest.  He  was  a  master  of  the 
courtly  lyric,  with  its  quaint  conceits  and 
artificial  "  Minnedienst  "  ;  he  was  also  master 
of  the  lyric  of  the  simple  life,  a  singer  whose 
songs  are  veritable  folksongs.  And  to  these 
two  domains  he  added  still  another ;  he 
became  under  the  stress  of  events  a  political 
poet  and  created  for  the  German  people  a 
new  type  of  higher  poetry,  which  took 
cognizance,  sometimes  satirically,  sometimes 
in  direct  challenge,  of  the  political  contro- 
versies of  the  time,  and  the  political  destinies 
of  the  German  Empire.  This  varied  extent 
of  Walther's  talent  must  be  especially  em- 
phasised ;  for  it  is  one  of  the  reasons  why 
the  German  Middle  Ages  looked  up  to  him 
as  their  most  representative  poet.  In  our 
appreciation  of  Walther's  love-lyrics  it  is 
sometimes  doubtful  if  what  we  moderns  find 


THE    MIDDLE   AGES  81 

particularly  to  our  taste  really  constitutes 
his  best  claim  to  supremacy  ;  in  other  words, 
to  the  reader  unversed  in  the  language  and 
phrases  of  mediaeval  love-poetry,  Walther's 
conventional  ideas  and  conventional  naivetS  are 
apt  to  appeal  with  more  force  than  the  more 
original  manifestations  of  his  genius.  His 
political  song  was,  after  all,  a  more  startling 
and  original  innovation  in  the  history  of  the 
German  lyric  than  his  matchless  love  lyrics. 
But  we  must  take  his  poetry  as  we  find  it ; 
and  in  simple,  unsophisticated  poetic  ex- 
pression, in  delicacy  of  spiritual  feeling 
and  imagining,  we  may  safely  say  that  no 
other  poet  of  Walther's  time  surpassed,  or 
even  approached  him.  In  Walther  we  see 
also  that  touch  of  the  modern  outlook  on 
things,  which  we  have  claimed  for  at  least  two 
of  the  other  great  German  mediaeval  poets  ; 
he  had  it,  indeed,  in  quite  a  pre-eminent 
degree.  For  he  was  no  careless,  joyous 
minstrel,  who  merely  skimmed  the  surface  of 
life,  and  rested  content  with  the  political 
basis  provided  by  Church  and  State ;  he, 
too,  attempted  to  penetrate  beneath  the 
exterior,  to  get  to  depths  unfamiliar  to  the 
common  man  ;  he,  too,  was  troubled  with  that 
divine  discontent,  which  has  made  in  all  ages 


32   THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

for  poetic  greatness.  Often  he  flings  out 
words  that  imply  embittered  discontent  with 
the  world  which  had  served  him  so  ill,  words 
which  form  a  strange  contrast  to  the  gentle 
lyrics  of  his  early  years  when  he  sang  with 
youthful  fervour  of  the  joys  of  spring,  and 
of  noble  ladies  moving  in  the  stately  pageant 
of  court  life.  Like  Wolfram  and  Gottfried, 
he,  too,  knew  what  renunciation  meant,  and 
had  learned  to  see  life  with  the  eyes  of  a 
pessimist. 

OwS  war  sint  verswunden        alliu  miniu  jSr  ! 
1st  mir  min  leben  getroumet        oder  ist  ez  war  ? 
Daz  ich  ie  wande  daz        iht  waere,  was  daz  iht  ? 
Dar  nach  ban  ich  geslafen        undo  enweiz  es  niht. 
NO.  bin  ich  erwachet        und  ist  mir  unbekant 
Daz  mir  hie  vor  was  kiindic        als  min  ander  hant. 
Liut  unde  lant,  da  ich        von  kinde  bin  erzogen, 
Die  sint  mir  fremde  worden,    reht'  als  ez  si  gelogen. 

("  Alas,  whither  have  all  my  years  van- 
ished ?  Has  my  life  been  a  dream,  or  is  it 
true  ?  Was  that  which  I  always  believed  to 
exist  anything  at  all  ?  It  would  seem  that 
I  have  slept  and  know  nothing  of  it.  Now  I 
am  awake,  and  what  I  knew  before  is  as 
unknown  to  me  as  one  hand  is  to  the  other. 
The  people  and  the  land  where  I  grew  up  from 
childhood  have  become  as  strange  to  me  as  if 
they  had  been  merely  lies.") 


THE    MIDDLE   AGES  88 

The  wonderful  literature  of  this  first  great 
flourishing  period  in  German  poetry  was  of 
strangely  short  duration.  As  the  castle  of 
Munsalvasche,  in  the  story  of  the  Gral,  ap- 
peared in  the  evening  to  Parzival  in  all  its 
glory,  and  on  the  morrow  lapsed  into  a 
lifeless  silence,  so  Middle  High  German  poetry 
flashed  across  its  age,  appeared  and  dis- 
appeared with  inexplicable  suddenness.  The 
really  inspired  poetry  hardly  outlived  the 
one  generation  of  great  poets ;  no  sooner 
had  they  passed  away,  than  the  light  seemed 
to  go  out  of  literature,  and  it  sank  to  the  level 
of  the  mere  amusement  of  an  idle  hour.  The 
great  mass  of  poetry  which  filled  up  the  later 
thirteenth  century  is  uninspired,  imitative, 
and  without  artistic  form  ;  it  was  content  to 
repeat  over  again  the  same  well-worn  themes, 
to  thresh  out  the  traditional  ideas  an&  carry 
to  ineptitude  the  old  imagery.  Rapidly  the 
great  fabric  of  Middle  High  German  poetry 
disintegrated  and  fell  asunder,  and  with  the 
close  of  the  Crusades  and  the  disappearance 
of  the  spiritual  background  of  chivalry,  its 
last  props  were  withdrawn  from  it.  The  only 
signs  of  health  in  this  age  of  decay  was  a  slight 
revival  of  poetic  imagination,  stimulated  by 
the  love  of  allegory,  which  in  France  had  risen 


34   THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

to  the  heights  of  the  Roman  de  la  Rose,  and  the 
steady  growth  of  that  aggressive  criticism  of 
life  which  in  literature  finds  its  outlet  in 
satire.  There  is  more  hope  to  be  found  in  the 
satiric  lyric  of  Neidhart  von  Reuental,  in  the 
outspoken,  fearless  couplets  of  Freidank, 
the  author  of  Bescheidenheit  (Worldly  Wisdom), 
than  in  the  efforts  of  their  contemporaries  to 
keep  alive  the  traditions  of  the  earlier  time. 
For  in  this  satiric  literature  we  see  the  spirit 
of  the  new  democracy  struggling  for  ex- 
pression ;  it  is  the  voice  of  a  stratum  of 
human  society,  which  in  the  epoch  of  feudalism 
had  been  closely  kept  in  subjection,  namely, 
the  dwellers  in  the  towns  as  distinct  from 
the  serfs  of  the  country,  in  other  words,  the 
new  middle  class. 

Thus  we  might  say  that  the  fourteenth  and 
fifteenth  centuries  in  Germany  were  filled 
partly  with  the  debris  of  medisevalism,  with 
the  remains  of  the  old  literature,  which 
could  only  be  kept  alive  at  all  with  the  help 
of  a  crass  realism  and  an  appeal  to  the  cruder 
popular  instincts,  and  partly  with  the  gradual 
struggle  for  expression  on  the  part  of  the 
town-dwellers,  who  in  the  sixteenth  century, 
the  century  of  the  Reformation — in  itself  the 
decisive  triumph  of  the  middle-class  spirit — 


THE   MIDDLE   AGES  35 

were  to  assume  the  leadership  in  German 
poetry.  Among  the  phenomena  which  mark 
these  converse  processes  are,  on  the  one  hand, 
the  epic  chronicles  of  the  Emperor  Maxi- 
milian I.,  Der  Weisskonig  (The  White  King, 
i.e.,  Frederick  III.),  and  the  less  historical 
Teuerdank,  which  represent  the  final  stage  in 
the  dissolution  of  the  Court  Epic  at  the 
beginning  of  the  sixteenth  century;  and,  on 
the  other,  the  substitution  of  a  new  and  purely 
popular  lyric  for  the  Minnesang,  which  con- 
tinued to  live  on  as  an  artificial,  and  often 
grotesquely  exaggerated  imitation  of  the 
external  form  of  the  Court  lyric,  the  so-called 
"  Meistergesang."  The  fifteenth  and  sixteenth 
centuries  form  the  flourishing  period  of  the 
German  Volkslied ;  all  the  most  beautiful 
popular  songs  go  back  to  this  age.  On  the 
other  hand,  the  emergence  of  the  new  spirit 
is  particularly  noticeable  in  works  like  Das 
Narrenschiff  (The  Ship  of  Fools),  by  Sebastian 
Brant,  with  its  ruthless,  acid  criticism  of  all 
the  follies  that  had  been  handed  down  from 
the  mediaeval  world,  and  had  survived  the 
social  change ;  in  that  scathing  analysis 
of  human  society  under  the  allegory  of  the 
Beast  Fable,  the  famous  epic  of  Reinke  de  Vos 
(Reineke  the  Fox),  which  remains  the  greatest 


36   THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

work  of  the  imagination  we  owe  to  the  Low 
German  peoples  ;  and  in  the  rapidly  multiply- 
ing collections  of  popular  story  and  anecdote, 
which  with  the  aid  of  the  democratising 
institution  of  printing,  were  soon  disseminated 
among  all  classes  of  the  population,  in  the  form 
of  "  Volksbiicher "  or  chapbooks.  These 
consist  of  collections  of  rough  witty  anecdote, 
usually  centring  round  some  witty  rogue  like 
the  famous  Till  Eulenspiegel,  or  handy  mis- 
cellaneous collections  of  stories  like  the  Roll- 
wageribuchlein  of  Jorg  Wickram  or  the  Schimpf 
und  Ernst  (Jest  and  Earnest)  of  Johannes 
Pauli,  both,  however,  works  of  a  compara- 
tively late  date. 


CHAPTER   H 

THE   PERIOD    OF  THE   REFORMATION 

ONE  has  an  instinctive  feeling  that  the  age 
which  witnessed  the  spiritual  upheaval  of  the 
Reformation  is  one  which  ought  to  be  pre- 
eminently "  great "  in  German  literature. 
If  a  literature  is  significant  in  proportion  as 
it  is  the  bearer  of  ideas,  then  the  age  of 
Luther  in  Germany  should  deserve  that 
distinction.  And  yet  this  was  hardly  the 
case  ;  to  the  outsider  coming  fresh  to  German 
literature,  the  sixteenth  century  is  a  dis- 
appointing epoch.  It  really  appeals  with  its 
full  force  only  to  the  literary  student  in  the 
narrower  sense,  that  is  to  say,  to  one  who  has 
an  interest  in  the  phenomena  of  literary  origins 
and  of  literary  germination  and  decay.  The 
sixteenth  century  was  not  a  period  of  ripe 
literary  production,  but  of  extraordinarily 
interesting  beginnings  in  literature.  This  is 
the  point  of  view  from  which  it  must  be 
studied.  For  actual  achievement,  the  intel- 

37 


38  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

lectual  revolution  came  too  early  to  find  an 
echo  in  literature  of  the  higher  kind,  that 
literature  not  having  yet  properly  emerged 
from  medievalism ;  it  was,  as  it  were,  not 
ready  to  be  a  vehicle  for  the  new  ideas. 

None  the  less,  Luther  stands  in  the  middle 
of  the  epoch.  Born  at  Eisleben  in  1483,  his 
first  great  emancipatory  deed  was  the  nailing 
of  his  impeachment  of  Catholicism  on  the 
church  door  in  Wittenberg  in  1517.  And  in 
the  next  few  years  the  decisive  battles  of  the 
new  faith  were  fought ;  in  1522  appeared  his 
three  manifestos  of  Protestantism,  To  the 
Christian  Nobility  of  the  German  Nation,  The 
Babylonian  Captivity  of  the  Church  and  The 
Freedom  of  a  Christian ;  and  between  1522 
and  1534  he  provided  the  new  faith  with  a 
solid  foundation  by  his  publication  of  the 
Bible  in  the  German  vernacular.  Luther's  Ger- 
man Bible  is  the  greatest  work  of  literature 
of  the  sixteenth  century  ;  it  is  the  pivot  round 
which  all  the  best  imaginative  activity  of  the 
German  people  in  that  age  turns.  Remember- 
ing these  dates,  one  has  only  to  turn  to  the 
annals  of  German  literature  to  see  how  piti- 
fully unprepared  German  literature  was  to 
draw  advantage  from  the  new  ideas.  Other, 
more  favoured  nations  were  able  to  respond 


PERIOD    OF   THE   REFORMATION  39 

at  once  to  the  widening  of  human  horizons  in 
the  sixteenth  century  ;  the  renascence  of  anti- 
quity, the  invention  of  printing,  the  voyages 
of  the  great  discoverers,  found  a  ready  and 
adequate  echo  in  England,  in  France,  in 
Spain ;  but  in  Germany  even  the  Reformation 
itself,  the  world-shaking  event  that  was 
happening  within  her  own  domains,  failed  to 
inspire  any  great  masterpiece  of  literature. 
The  German,  who  had  got  no  further  than  the 
Ship  of  Fools  and  Reineke  the  Fox,  was  entirely 
nonplussed  by  the  fulness  of  new  light ;  he 
was  merely  blinded  by  it,  and  confused. 

In  other  countries — our  own,  for  instance — • 
where  the  Reformation  has  been  all-powerful, 
it  was  preceded  by  the  Renaissance,  which 
prepared  poetry  to  take  advantage  of  the 
spiritual  enfranchisement  of  the  religious 
movement ;  in  Germany  the  Renaissance  did 
not  become  a  force  of  magnitude  in  literature 
until  the  following  century.  This  seems  to  us 
one  explanation  of  the  imaginative  ineffectual- 
ness  of  German  sixteenth-century  poetry. 
The  only  preparation  the  Germans  knew,  was 
that  scholarly  prologue  to  the  Renaissance 
which  is  known  as  Humanism. 

German  Humanism  dates  from  the  founding 
of  the  University  of  Prague  in  1348  ;  and 


40  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

from  Prague  it  spread  rapidly  to  all  the  other 
German  intellectual  centres,  quickening  the 
intellectual  life  at  the  universities,  and  opening 
up  to  the  German  people  the  treasures  of 
classical  antiquity.  Its  representatives,  how- 
ever, wrote  mainly  in  Latin,  and  in  a  cos- 
mopolitan, un-German  way,  so  that  it  is 
difficult,  in  discussing  the  German  literature 
of  this  epoch,  to  include  the  work  of  these 
writers  at  all.  There  was,  for  instance,  in  the 
Reformation  century,  a  large  and  extremely 
interesting  dramatic  literature  in  Latin,  but  it 
was  merely  part  of  a  literature  that  knew 
no  national  boundaries.  The  Latin  literature 
of  Europe  in  the  sixteenth  century  can  only 
be  regarded  as  one.  But  the  important  thing 
for  us  to  notice  is  that,  before  very  long  the 
influence  of  these  Latin  writers  made  itself 
felt  in  the  vernacular  literature.  The  new 
beginnings  in  German  poetry  owed,  and 
realised  that  they  owed,  their  first  material 
help  to  the  humanists ;  and  the  ties  that 
bound  the  literature  of  the  sixteenth  century 
to  Humanism  were  in  reality  closer  than  those 
which  bound  it  to  the  Reformation.  The 
humanists  were,  in  the  first  instance,  men  of 
letters ;  they  cultivated,  for  example,  the 
Latin  comedy,  not  merely  by  reviving  Terence 


PERIOD   OF   THE   REFORMATION  41 

and  Plautus,  but  by  themselves  writing 
original  comedies  in  the  spirit  of  their  time 
and  giving  voice  to  their  own  ideas ;  and,  as  we 
shall  see,  this  humanistic  drama  soon  drew 
the  indigenous  drama  into  its  train.  Then 
again,  the  humanists  acted  as  interpreters  of 
the  Classic  and  Renaissance  literatures  to  the 
German  people,  and  thus  placed  at  their  dis- 
posal a  rich  harvest  of  literary  story  and 
poetic  ideas. 

But  notwithstanding  all  this,  Humanism 
had  not  the  power  to  touch  the  German 
heart ;  it  left  the  nation  as  a  whole  cold. 
The  real  motor  force  of  the  literary  revival 
came  from  another  side,  from  Mysticism, 
which  appears  side  by  side  with  Humanism 
in  this  age.  It  is  interesting  to  observe  the 
role  which  mysticism  has  always  played  in 
Germany ;  we  have  already  seen  an  instance 
of  its  peculiar  redeeming  force  at  the  begin- 
ning of  the  Middle  High  German  period  ;  and 
we  shall  meet  with  it  again  on  more  than  one 
critical  occasion  in  the  evolution  of  German 
literature ;  for  it  has  been  the  invariable 
forerunner  of  every  period  of  imaginative 
vigour.  From  the  humanists  the  literature 
of  the  sixteenth  century  borrowed  its  form 
and  materials  ;  from  Mysticism  came  its  soul. 


42  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

Meister  Eckhart,  Heinrich  Seuse,  Johann 
Tauler,  Johann  Geiler  of  Kaisersberg,  all 
mystics,  form  a  line  of  philosophical  theo- 
logians, who  handed  on  the  torch  from  the 
fourteenth  century  to  the  sixteenth  ;  their 
theology  made  a  strong  individualistic  appeal 
by  turning  men's  thoughts  inwards  to  their 
own  hearts  and  souls,  and  thus  prepared  the 
way  for  Luther  and  the  Protestant  revolt 
against  the  domination  of  Rome. 

The  literature  inspired  by  Mysticism  in  these 
centuries  forms  an  exceedingly  interesting 
chapter,  but  a  very  complicated  one.  We 
have  found  the  new  spirit  manifesting  itself 
in  the  earlier  period  through  the  clumsy 
medium  of  allegorical  poetry  ;  we  find  it  also 
in  more  subtle  allegories  of  the  Game  of  Chess, 
such  as  were  familiar  in  every  European 
literature ;  we  find  it  invading  the  fervid 
imaginings  of  monastic  singers,  nuns  as  well 
as  monks.  The  mystically  inspired  literature 
of  that  time  suffered  under  the  fantastic 
exaggeration  of  its  imaginative  flights.  It 
seized  with  avidity  on  every  opportunity  for 
fantastic  excess  ;  symbolism  and  allegory  ran 
riot ;  and,  at  a  later  date,  it  gloried  in  the 
unrealities  of  the  Renaissance  pastoral.  But 
the  never  failing  bedrock  on  which  all  this 


PERIOD   OF   THE    REFORMATION  43 

fantastry  was  erected,  was  a  strong,  personal 
individualism,  a  subjectivity,  which  remained 
eternally  true,  when  often  the  whole  super- 
structure was  insincere  and  false.  Thus, 
as  an  adjunct  to  the  lyric,  mysticism  was  a 
factor  of  real  power.  The  mystics  also  gave 
the  Germans  their  first  vernacular  Bible ; 
and  they  prepared  the  way  for  the  intimately 
personal  Protestant  hymn. 

But  the  thinker  who  first  made  mysticism 
an  irresistible  force  in  literature  was  Jakob 
Boehme,  a  shoemaker  of  Gorlitz ;  in  1612 
he  published  his  strange,  mystic  book  Aurora, 
oder  Morgenrote  im  Aufgang  (Aurora,  or  The 
Rising  of  the  Dawn).  Boehme  was  no  doubt 
one  of  Germany's  most  original  spirits  ;  for  it  is 
surprising  how  little  of  his  intricate  metaphy- 
sical thinking  can  be  attributed  to  direct  bor- 
rowing from  predecessors.  There  is,  indeed, 
something  unfathomable  about  Boehme's 
mysticism ;  and  while  the  unbeliever  can 
merely  scoff,  later  generations  have  returned 
to  him  again  and  again,  and  have  never  come 
away  empty-handed  ;  his  works  have  proved 
an  inexhaustible  bourne  for  the  fact-weary 
human  mind  in  all  ages.  The  immediate 
influence  of  Boehme  on  his  generation  is 
not  easy  to  estimate ;  but  we  suspect  that  it 


44  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

has  been  underestimated  rather  than  over- 
estimated. It  is  to  be  seen  most  plainly  in 
the  Catholic  poets  of  the  sixteenth  century, 
in  Johannes  Scheffler,  better  known  by  his 
assumed  name  of  Angelus  Silesius,  the  author 
of  that  extraordinary  precipitate  of  mysticism, 
Der  Cherubinische  Wandersmann,  in  which  the 
most  intangible  of  thoughts  are  pinned  down 
and  concentrated  in  couplets  of  startling 
paradox.  It  is  to  be  seen,  too,  in  the  Catholic 
Renaissance  poetry  of  the  pious  Friedrich  von 
Spec,  a  Jesuit  of  fine  poetic  feeling,  whose 
Trutznachtigall  is  one  of  the  most  pleasing 
poetic  products  of  this  age.  In  Spec  the 
mystic  element  was  combined  with  the  pastoral 
allegory,  and  resulted  in  a  gentle,  non-militant 
Christian  faith,  which  took  little  or  no  account 
of  the  storms  evoked  by  Luther.  And  there 
is  mysticism,  too,  in  Luther  himself,  stern 
realist  although  he  was ;  his  hymns  and  the 
whole  rich  literature  of  religious  hymn-poetry, 
which  with  marvellous  fecundity  the  Lutheran 
clergy  of  the  sixteenth  and  seventeenth  cen- 
turies poured  forth,  would  assuredly  not  have 
become  what  they  did  become,  had  it  not  been 
for  this  universal  solvent  which  united  all 
hearts. 

But   it   is   time   to   turn   from   these   two 


PERIOD    OF   THE    REFORMATION   45 

defining  forces  which  preceded  and  accom- 
panied the  Reformation,  to  the  reflection  in 
literature  of  that  movement  itself.  The 
Reformation  in  Germany  was  Luther,  and 
Luther's  Bible  was,  as  we  have  seen,  the 
greatest  book  of  the  century.  This  is  a 
fact  which  must  never  be  lost  sight  of.  Luther 
was  one  of  these  men  who  appear  from  time 
to  time  in  history,  and  stand  out  as  the 
bearers  of  a  Divine  mission  of  which  they  are 
themselves  only  imperfectly  conscious.  The 
Reformation  was,  so  to  speak,  a  task  imposed 
on  Luther  ;  he  had  himself  no  idea  of  its 
magnitude  when  he  first  put  his  hand  to  it. 
He  had  set  out  merely  to  reform  certain 
crying  abuses  within  the  Church;  and  he 
did  not  know  from  one  year  to  another,  not 
at  least  in  the  eventful,  germinating  period 
of  Protestantism  from  1517  to  about  1530, 
whither  he  was  driving,  or  being  driven. 
From  merely  denouncing  the  sale  of  indul- 
gences, he  had  been,  as  it  wrere,  urged  forward 
by  some  force  outside  himself,  to  demand  the 
spiritual  freedom  of  the  Christian,  to  translate 
the  Bible  and  to  reconstruct  German  society 
on  a  new  basis  of  social  morality  and  re- 
ligious community.  He  reformed  German 
education,  he  gave  Germany  her  hymn-book  ; 


46  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

and  it  was  no  fault  of  his  that,  even  before 
he  died,  the  "  alte  bose  Feind  "  reared  his  head 
once  more,  and  threatened  to  undo  all  that 
the  Reformation  had  achieved.  The  work 
of  the  Reformation  was,  unfortunately,  not 
completed  until  after  Germany  had  been 
depleted  by  the  most  terrible  war  in  the  whole 
history  of  humanity. 

The  main  question  that  interests  us  here  is, 
however,  what  did  the  Reformation  mean  for 
German  literature  in  the  sixteenth  century  ? 
It  virtually  meant  everything  ;  its  stimulating 
force  is  to  be  traced  alike  on  Protestant  and 
Catholic,  and,  indeed,  one  might  say  that 
the  Catholic  writers  of  the  epoch  profited 
more  by  it  than  their  Protestant  colleagues. 
To  begin  with,  the  Reformation  brought  to 
triumphant  expression  that  new  conception 
of  society  which  had  been  struggling  half- 
heartedly against  a  decrepit  mediaeval  feuda- 
lism in  the  previous  century  ;  it  marked  the 
triumph  of  the  middle  class,  of  the  "  Burger." 
It  wrested  the  supreme  dictatorial  power 
in  matters  of  the  imagination  from  one  privi- 
leged class.  This  meant,  not  necessarily 
the  triumph  of  democracy  in  literature — that 
was  still  afar  off — but  the  end  of  the  absolute 
rule  of  a  social  aristocracy ;  from  now  on, 


PERIOD    OF   THE   REFORMATION  47 

literature  becomes,  whether  the  poets  happen 
to  be  nobles  or  peasants,  in  the  full  sense, 
the  expression  not  of  a  class,  but  of  the  nation. 
It  is  in  respect  of  such  qualities  that  Luther's 
Bible  may  be,  and  has  been  claimed,  as  the 
greatest  German  "  Volksbuch." 

But  Luther's  services  to  German  literature 
were  far  from  being  restricted  to  his  Bible ; 
although  in  no  sense  a  lyric  poet,  he  gave 
Germany  her  Protestant  hymnal,  a  little 
rough  and  uncouth  it  is  true,  but  full  of  that 
intense  earnestness  which  outweighs  all  else. 
And  he  did  a  great  work  towards  the  unification 
of  the  German  tongue.  With  the  decay  of 
the  Middle  High  German  Court  literature  and 
the  rise  of  the  middle  class,  a  hopeless 
confusion  had  set  in  in  the  language  of 
Germany.  One  dialect  struggled  with  another 
for  supremacy,  and  there  was  not  even  a  hope 
that  the  fittest  would  survive.  The  political 
exigencies  of  the  Empire  required,  however, 
some  kind  of  common  basis  of  linguistic 
understanding  amongst  all  speakers  of  the 
German  tongue  ;  and  thus  arose  the  "  Kanz- 
leisprachen,"  that  is  to  say,  more  or  less 
normalised  forms  of  German  in  use  between  the 
various  chancelleries  of  the  Empire.  It  was 
natural  that  in  the  establishing  of  this  norm, 


48   THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

the  Imperial  chancellery  should  have  had  the 
chief  say.  Moreover,  as  the  seat  of  Imperial 
government  had  been  moved,  in  the  course  of 
his  history,  from  one  land  to  another,  and 
had  been  obliged  to  employ  as  its  clerks  men 
speaking  the  most  different  German  dialects, 
a  certain  natural  normalisation  set  in  as  a 
matter  of  course.  A  still  more  subtle  in- 
fluence in  the  same  direction  was  the  invention 
of  printing.  Printers  obviously  sought  as  wide 
a  public  as  possible  for  their  wares  ;  it  was 
to  their  interest  to  avoid  such  dialectic 
peculiarities  as  might  not  be  understood 
outside  a  limited  district.  Now,  Luther 
with  his  Bible  furthered  the  movement  to- 
wards one  common  form  of  speech  which 
these  two  agencies  had  inaugurated.  He,  too, 
felt  that  it  was  vital  to  Protestantism  that 
the  Bible  should  be  understood  by  the 
"  common  man  "  and  throughout  as  wide  afc. 
area  of  the  German-speaking  world  as  possible. 
He  tells  us  himself  how  carefully  he  weighed 
the  question,  and  how  he  ultimately  decided 
to  choose  the  language  of  the  Saxon  chan- 
cellery as  best  likely  to  fulfil  his  requirements. 
But  the  choice  of  dialect  was  only  the  first 
step  ;  he  was  untiring  in  his  efforts  to  give 
his  great  work  the  fullest  validity  possible ; 


PERIOD    OF   THE   REFORMATION   49 

and  each  succeeding  edition  showed  that  he 
considered  the  language  of  his  translation  of 
the  very  first  importance.  It  is  thus  not  too 
much  to  say  that  the  Lutheran  Bible  gave 
Protestant  Germany  one  generally  accepted 
literary  language ;  the  Catholic  south  of 
Germany  alone  stood  out,  and  to  a  slight 
extent  still  stands  out,  against  the  unifying 
process. 

The  first  place  in  the  literature  of  the 
sixteenth  century  belongs  to  satire  ;  the  fierce 
conflicts  of  that  rough  age  demanded  fierce 
expression,  and  the  German  satire  of  the 
Reformation  is  the  most  ruthless  and  vitupera- 
tive in  the  whole  history  of  this  literature. 
But  here,  as  was  perhaps  only  natural,  it  was 
the  losing,  not  the  triumphant  side,  that  rose 
to  the  greatest  heights ;  the  outstanding 
German  satires  of  the  sixteenth  century  came 
from  the  Catholics.  The  chief  of  these 
Catholic  poets  was  Thomas  Murner,  a  monk 
of  Strassburg,  who  had  behind  him  not  merely 
the  conservatism  of  the  Roman  Church,  but 
also  the  whole  weight  of  a  humanistic  educa- 
tion. Although  Murner  did  not  hesitate  to 
descend  to  depths  of  scurrility,  especially  in 
his  venomous  attack  on  the  reformer  himself, 
Vom  grossen  lutherischen  Narren  (Of  the  Great 


50  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

Lutheran  Fool),  from  which  one  would  have 
thought  readers  with  the  slightest  culture 
would  have  turned  away  in  disgust,  yet  he  was, 
according  to  the  light  of  his  century,  a  highly 
cultured  man ;  no  doubt  he  thought  that  so 
fierce  an  onslaught  as  Luther  had  made  on 
Christianity  called  for  the  most  drastic 
retaliation.  In  any  case,  the  sixteenth  cen- 
tury was  not  an  age  in  which  men  handled 
each  other  with  the  kid  gloves  of  politeness. 
In  Murner's  eyes  Luther  was  a  criminal  of  the 
worst  type,  who  had  destroyed — he  made 
himself  no  illusion  as  to  the  deadliness  of 
Luther's  blows — the  golden  age  of  a  Christianity 
which  had  borne  the  torch  of  idealism  all 
through  the  Middle  Ages  ;  had  discredited 
the  very  saints  themselves  ;  and  for  what 
end  ?  Merely  to  put  weapons  in  the  hands 
of  the  common  man  for  which  the  Church 
well  knew  he  was  not  ripe,  and  which 
Murner  feared  he  would  soon  put  to  evil 
purpose.  Murner  is  a  great  satirist,  albeit 
a  terribly  coarse  one ;  he  believed  with 
intense  earnestness  that,  in  combating  the 
Reformation,  he  was  championing  a  holy 
cause. 

The  advancing  tide  of   Protestantism  h?«d 
the  help  of  no  such  man.     Perhaps  one  might 


PERIOD   OF   THE   REFORMATION  51 

say,  the  victorious  cause  had  no  need  of  satire 
to  further  it.  The  energy  of  the  reformers 
was  so  completely  taken  up  with  positive, 
reconstructive  work  that  it  had  none  left  for 
mere  literature.  There  is  little  imaginative 
writing  of  any  kind  emanating  from  the 
Protestant  side  in  the  early  decades  of  the 
Reformation  which  need  arrest  our  attention. 
The  only  one  of  Luther's  fellow-workers, 
besides  himself,  who  was  associated  with 
literature,  was  the  Franconian  nobleman, 
Ulrich  von  Hutten,  and  he  was  a  man  of 
letters  less  by  virtue  of  his  advocacy  of 
Protestantism  than  by  virtue  of  his  humanistic 
leanings.  But  Hutten  is  one  of  the  tragic 
figures  of  his  age,  one  for  whom  the  new  light 
was  too  strong,  and  who  made  lamentable 
shipwreck  of  his  own  life. 

To  find  a  counterpart  to  Murner  on  the 
Protestant  side,  we  must  wait  until  a  decade 
or  two  later,  when  Johann  Fischart,  from 
behind  a  bulwark  of  confusing  pseudonyms, 
sent  out  his  bolts  in  the  interest  of  Luther's 
cause.  Fischart,  too,  was  a  native  of  Strass- 
burg,  or,  at  any  rate,  intimately  associated 
with  that  all-important  centre  of  intellectual 
activity  in  the  sixteenth  century.  His 
literary  pack  is  a  much  larger  one  than 


52   THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

Murner's.  Much,  however,  that  he  wrote 
would  seem  to  have  been  undertaken  merely 
to  supply  one  of  the  Strassburg  printing- 
presses  with  matter  ;  it  represents  too  con- 
flicting tendencies  of  thought  to  have  possibly 
been  the  honest  expression  of  a  single  mind. 
Moreover,  the  fact  that  Fischart  appeared  at 
a  later  stage  in  the  development  of  Protestan- 
tism made  a  material  difference  in  his  attitude 
to  the  religious  movement.  He  was  not 
obliged  to  concentrate,  as  it  were,  on  the  few 
burning  questions  round  which  the  first 
Lutheran  reforms  raged  ;  he  was  able  to  take 
a  wider  outlook  on  the  century,  and  to  give  a 
juster  picture  of  it.  For  better  or  worse,  a  great 
French  book,  the  Gargantua  and  Pantagruel 
of  Rabelais,  fell  into  Fischart's  hands,  and  he 
determined  to  give  his  countrymen  the  benefit 
of  it.  This  translation,  if  translation  it  may 
be  called,  is  Fischart's  most  ambitious  work  ; 
he  has  not  merely  translated,  not  merely 
adapted  Rabelais  to  German  conditions  ;  he 
has  used  the  text  only  as  a  framework 
into  which  to  crowd  all  he  himself  thought 
about  his  time  and  nation.  His  German 
Rabelais — A  ffentheurlich  naupengeheurliche 
Geschichtklitterung,  as  he  called  it  with  his 
fantastic,  untranslatable  humour — is  an  extra- 


PERIOD    OF   THE   REFORMATION   53 

ordinary  conglomeration  of  the  most  promis- 
cuous material,  inflated  by  a  strange,  uncouth 
exaggeration,  and  dealing  covert,  satiric  blows 
at  all  and  sundry.  But  Fischart  was  also  a 
poet,  and  in  his  Das  gluckhafte  Schiff  von 
Zurich  (The  Lucky  Ship  of  Zurich),  he 
produced  a  poem  which,  in  polish  and  form, 
stands  alone  in  the  German  literature  of  the 
sixteenth  century. 

On  the  whole,  however,  the  most  interesting 
form  of  literature  which  drew  its  main  inspira- 
tion from  the  Reformation  was  the  drama. 
We  have  not  so  far  said  anything  in  this  little 
volume  about  the  drama  in  Germany  ;  and, 
indeed,  there  has  not  yet  been  much  to  say. 
The  drama  is  a  form  of  literature  which, 
in  all  lands  in  Europe,  begins  in  a  quite 
unnational  way ;  there  is,  so  to  speak,  no 
primitive  French  or  English  or  German  drama, 
at  most,  Italy  could  trace  a  certain  continuity 
back  to  the  old  Roman  theatre ;  there  is 
only  a  primitive  European  drama,  which  owed 
its  sole  allegiance  to  the  Church.  Thus  the 
Church-drama  in  Germany  differs  but  little 
from  that  of  other  lands  ;  only  now  and  again, 
when  it  strays  into  secular  fields,  does  it  reflect 
the  national  German  standpoint,  such,  for  ex- 
ample, as  in  the  echo  of  Barbarossa's  glory  in 


54  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

a  Mystery-play  of  the  thirteenth  century,  or  in 
the  later  legends  of  Pope  Johanna  and  Theo- 
philus,  the  latter  a  kind  of  forerunner  of 
Faust.  The  purely  national  drama  does  not 
show  itself  until  the  end  of  the  fifteenth 
century  ;  here  the  earliest  manifestations  are, 
apart  from  the  Latin  humanistic  drama  to 
which  reference  has  already  been  made,  the 
beginnings  of  an  extremely  interesting  form 
of  native  vernacular  comedy,  the  so-called 
"  Fastnachtsspiel,"  or  shrovetide-play.  The 
"  Fastnachtsspiel  "  and  the  Latin  comedy, 
together  with  the  mediaeval  tradition  of  the 
Church-drama,  formed  the  materials  out  of 
which  a  German  national  drama  was  gradually 
welded. 

This  new  drama,  however,  received  an  enor- 
mous impetus  from  the  Reformation  which 
broke  over  Germany  almost  before  that  drama 
had  had  time  to  develop  at  all.  Clearly  no 
form  of  literature  was  likely  to  benefit  more 
by  the  liberating  forces  of  Protestantism  than 
this  ;  and  the  dramatic  writers  at  once  put 
themselves  at  the  service  of  the  Reforma- 
tion. Thus  the  sixteenth  century  drama, 
when  it  was  not  purely  Latin  and  humanistic 
— and  even  then — was  a  Protestant  drama. 
Its  beginnings  are  to  be  seen  most  clearly  in 


PERIOD    OF   THE   REFORMATION   55 

Switzerland  where  Pamphilus  Gengenbach, 
himself,  however,  no  Swiss,  wrote  rude 
"  Fastnachtsspiele  "  in  the  interests  of  the 
Reformation ;  and  where  Niklas  Manuel,  a 
many-sided  genius,  worthy  of  greater  things, 
employed  the  dramatic  form  in  several  virile 
and  effective  satires  on  the  Catholics.  Then 
Saxon  and  Central  German  pastors  began  to 
cultivate  the  new  literary  form;  Sixt  Birck 
wrote  a  Susanna ;  and  Paul  Rebhun  followed 
with  a  drama  on  this  same  theme,  one  of  the 
most  frequently  dramatised  of  the  sixteenth 
century.  Another  favourite  theme,  which  had 
already  found  favour  with  the  humanists, 
was  The  Prodigal  Son  ;  and  in  Wiirttemberg 
the  gifted,  but  unruly,  Swabian  humanist, 
Nikodemus  Frischlin,  wrote  an  entire  series 
of  plays  on  favourite  Biblical  and  humanistic 
subjects.  Meanwhile  the  Latin  School  Comedy 
not  only  taught  the  vernacular  drama  the 
laws  of  form  which  had  come  down  from 
antiquity,  the  division  into  acts  and  other 
technicalities,  but  was  also  itself  in  turn 
influenced  by  it.  The  most  interesting  figure 
in  this  dramatic  movement,  however,  is  the 
famous  cobbler  of  Niirnberg,  Hans  Sachs. 

If  Strassburg  was  the  metropolis  of  religious 
controversy  and  higher  intellectual  life  of  the 


56  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

sixteenth  century,  Niirnberg,  the  city  of 
Adam  Kraft,  Peter  Fischer  and  Albrecht 
Diirer,  was  the  centre  of  its  artistic  life.  And 
here  was  born  in  1494  Hans  Sachs ;  here  he 
died  in  1576.  His  life  thus  all  but  fills  the 
sixteenth  century,  and  his  work  reflects 
that  century  as  it  no  doubt  was  reflected  in 
the  placid  mind  of  the  sixteenth-century 
town-dweller.  Hans  Sachs,  in  his  strength  as 
in  his  weakness,  is  a  typical  representation  of 
the  middle  class  of  his  age.  Compared  with 
the  picture  of  the  time  we  obtain  from  Murner 
or  Fischart,  that  which  we  get  from  the 
Niirnberg  cobbler's  poetry  is,  no  doubt,  a 
somewhat  superficial  one.  Only  once,  and  that 
in  early  life,  was  he  really  moved,  namely, 
when  he  himself  first  fell  under  the  influence 
of  the  Reformation ;  and  he  came  thereby  into 
sharp  conflict  with  his  native  town.  That, 
however,  soon  passed,  for  Niirnberg,  before 
very  long,  went  bodily  over  to  the  new  faith. 
For  the  rest  of  his  life,  Sachs  or  at  least  his 
writings,  knew  nothing  of  the  "  time  spirit." 
He  lived  on  placidly  and  happily,  as  if  there 
were  no  wars  and  no  bloodshed,  as  if  the 
sun  were  always  shining  ;  and  even  domestic 
bereavements  hardly  disturbed  his  serenity. 
With  the  regularity  of  a  definite  task  he 


PERIOD    OF   THE   REFORMATION  57 

poured  out,  day  in,  day  out,  his  unceasing 
flow  of  narrative  poems,  of  Meisterlieder — 
for  he  was  also  a  *'  mastersinger  " — tragedies, 
comedies,  and  "  Fastnachtsspiele."  He  loved 
everything  and  anything  that  savoured  of  the 
nature  of  a  story ;  and  he  sought  stories 
everywhere,  in  every  book  that  came  his  way, 
from  the  Bible  to  the  Italian  novelists,  from 
the  classics  to  contemporary  German  anecdote- 
collectors  ;  and  he  turned  them  all  into  facile 
verse,  graced  often  with  a  kindly  humour, 
but  rarely  or  never  with  any  spiritual  depth 
or  seriousness — turned  them  into  poems  or 
plays,  as  it  suited  his  momentary  fancy.  It 
seems  to  have  been  immaterial  to  him  whether 
he  called  the  more  ambitious  of  his  plays 
tragedies  or  comedies  ;  whereas  the  "  Fast- 
nachtsspiel  "  was  a  shorter  play  of  a  more 
anecdotal  and  humorous  or  satiric  character. 
Hans  Sachs  has  left  a  large  body  of  verse 
behind  him,  volumes  upon  volumes — his 
dramas  alone  number  over  two  hundred — 
and  almost  every  separate  item  is  conscien- 
tiously dated.  In  spite  of  this  we  can 
trace  little  or  no  development  in  his  writings  ; 
little  or  nothing  is  based  on  experiences  of  his 
own  personal  life,  so  completely  objective  is 
his  attitude  to  literature  as  he  understood  it. 


58  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

The  absence  of  development  in  Hans 
Sachs'  dramatic  poetry,  however,  was  not 
solely  due  to  the  conservative  character  of 
the  man  himself ;  it  was  partly  because  the 
German  sixteenth-century  drama  had  got  into 
a  blind  alley  and  could  not  make  headway. 
There  is,  in  fact,  something  wrong  with 
the  entire  drama  of  this  age,  interesting 
although  it  is  ;  it  is  a  drama  without  real 
dramatic  qualities.  In  all  this  very  extensive 
literature  hardly  a  drop,  unless  by  accident, 
is  to  be  found  of  the  real  quintessence  of 
dramatic  poetry,  the  quintessence  without 
which  a  play,  as  such,  must  necessarily  fail. 
Unfortunately,  the  German  drama  of  this 
period  had  sprung  up  independently  of  the 
theatre,  or,  at  best,  associated  with  a  totally 
inadequate  one.  There  had  been  performances 
of  Latin  plays,  as  there  had  been  of  church- 
dramas,  and  no  doubt  the  "  Fastnachtsspiel  " 
was  played  on  a  few  boards  set  up  in  the 
midst  of  the  village  merry-making  at  carnival 
time  ;  but  the  actors  in  Latin  dramas  and  in 
church-plays  performed  under  conditions 
where  the  dramatic  appeal  was  superfluous  ; 
and  the  "  Fastnachtsspiel  "  was  little  more 
than  an  acted  dialogue.  The  only  lesson  in 
technique  came  from  the  pale  imitations  of  the 


PERIOD    OF   THE   REFORMATION  59 

classics,  and  that  was  not  enough.  The  German 
sixteenth-century  drama  was  thus,  unlike  that 
of  England,  in  danger  of  dying  from  inanition, 
from  want  of  touch  with  the  theatre.  To- 
wards the  end  of  the  century  a  prospect  of 
reform  appeared,  and  that  from  the  very  best 
possible  quarter,  from  England  itself.  English 
actors  visited  the  Continent,  bringing  with 
them  the  treasures  of  the  Elizabethan  stage, 
no  doubt  in  very  garbled  versions.  From  the 
German  standpoint  this  was  no  disadvantage, 
for  it  was  just  the  "  unliterary  "  element  of 
theatrical  effectiveness  accentuated  by  these 
actors,  that  Germany  needed.  These  "  English 
comedians,"  who  wandered  all  over  the  Contin- 
ent at  different  times,  received  an  especially 
warm  welcome  in  Germany,  the  Germans 
appreciating  in  particular  the  clown,  whom 
the  companies  took  care  to  provide,  even  in 
the  most  harrowing  tragedies.  Before  very 
long,  we  find  German  troupes  imitating  them, 
and  German  playwrights,  such  as  Duke 
Heinrich  Julius  of  Brunswick  and  Jakob 
Ayrer — the  latter,  like  Hans  Sachs,  a  native 
of  Niirnberg — endeavouring  to  graft  this  new 
art  on  to  the  dramatically  ineffective  native 
drama.  Now  at  last  it  seemed  as  if  there 
were  some  hope  for  the  German  theatre ; 


60  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

but  before  it  had  advanced  very  far  on  the 
new  path,  the  Thirty  Years'  War  broke  over 
Germany  and  made  the  representation  of 
plays  of  any  kind  a  hazardous  and  even 
impossible  undertaking. 

These,  then,  are  the  most  interesting  types 
of  German  literature  in  the  sixteenth  century, 
but  we  are  far  from  having  exhausted  the 
literary  activity  of  the  age.  There  was,  for 
instance,  a  vast  pamphlet-literature  in  the 
interest  of  the  new  ideas,  the  pamphlet, 
together  with  the  ballad,  taking  the  place  of 
the  yet  unborn  newspaper.  The  spread  of 
printing  made  demands  on  those  who  had 
talent  enough  to  supply  the  materials ;  there 
was,  in  particular,  much  activity  in  publish- 
ing translations  from  Latin,  Italian  and  French 
literatures,  and  these,  in  turn,  helped  to  spread 
the  humanising  influence  of  the  Renaissance. 
It  was  too  fierce  an  age  for  the  more  delicate 
forms  of  emotional  "  Volkslied  "  ;  but  there 
were  "  Volkslieder "  of  a  new  kind  which 
reflected  the  attitude  of  the  nation  to  the 
political  issues  of  the  time.  Another  interest- 
ing phase  of  popular  literature  is  to  be  seen  in 
the  "  Volksbiicher,"  or  chap-books,  which  we 
first  meet  with  hi  quantity  in  this  century. 
They  formed,  we  might  say,  the  last  refuge- 


PERIOD    OF   THE    REFORMATION   61 

place  of  mediaeval  story ;  the  old  sagas,  long 
deprived  of  their  pride  of  place,  lived  on  now  in 
these  rough  prose  versions,  which  were  sold  at 
village  fairs,  and  provided  the  literary  enter- 
tainment of  the  people.  To  this  group  of 
literature  belongs  one  book  of  supreme  in- 
terest, the  "  Volksbuch  "  of  Doctor  Johann 
Faust,  which  served,  two  centuries  later,  as 
the  basis  for  the  greatest  of  all  German 
poems. 


CHAPTER  HI 


THERE  is  no  more  tragic  event  in  the  literary 
history  of  the  German  people  than  the  set- 
back which  befel  the  nation  at  the  beginning 
of  the  seventeenth  century.  All  the  splendid 
promise  of  the  sixteenth  century,  the  teeming 
spiritual  life  that  had  arisen  from  the  storms  of 
religious  controversy,  came  to  naught.  Eng- 
land rose  to  the  heights  of  her  Elizabethan 
poetry  on  the  new  foundation  afforded  by 
Reformation  and  Renaissance ;  France,  too, 
was  entering  on  an  epoch  of  unexampled 
brilliancy  in  her  imaginative  life ;  but  Ger- 
many, the  very  home  of  the  Reformation, 
only  drew  from  the  religious  struggle  blood 
and  tears  ;  her  poetry  was  crushed  out  of  her 
by  unending,  embittered  strife ;  and  the 
Renaissance  light,  which  found  its  way  to  her 
so  pitifully  late,  became  a  mockery  and  a 
curse,  instead  of  a  helpful  aid  to  the  unfolding 
of  her  national  literature. 
62 


RENAISSANCE    AND    ROCOCO      63 

The  seventeenth  century  opened  not  un- 
favourably for  Germany.  The  nation  was 
steadily  increasing  in  prosperity,  and  the 
rumours  of  war,  although  ominous,  were  still 
at  least  distant.  Literary,  or  rather  lin- 
guistic, societies  on  Renaissance  models  were 
springing  into  existence,  and  would  doubtless, 
under  favourable  political  conditions,  have 
exerted  a  widely  beneficial  influence  on 
literature  ;  and  the  drama,  which,  as  we  saw, 
had  come  to  more  or  less  of  a  deadlock  in  the 
sixteenth  century,  had  suddenly  been  aided 
by  the  example  of  the  English  theatre.  All 
this  augured  well ;  but  then  the  war  broke  out, 
and  from  1618  to  1648,  Germany  lay  helpless, 
trodden  underfoot  by  the  ruthless  mercen- 
aries of  all  nations  that  made  up  the 
armies  of  the  Thirty  Years'  War.  The  country 
became  the  camping  ground  for  both  sides 
in  the  merciless  religious  strife  which  pitted 
the  Catholic  Empire  against  the  Protestants 
of  the  north.  The  fairly  prosperous  land  of 
the  beginning  of  the  seventeenth  century  was 
impoverished,  devastated,  and  depopulated 
to  the  last  degree.  And  to  make  good  the 
set-back  which  this  thirty  years'  devastation 
brought  with  it,  Germany  required  at  least 
thirty  more  years.  It  is  thus  hardly  an  exag- 


64  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

geration  to  say  that  the  intellectual  life  of  the 
people  was  crippled  and  ruined  by  the  war  for 
little  short  of  a  century. 

It  was  almost  in  the  nature  of  things  that 
such  literature  as  did  manage  to  creep  into 
existence  under  these  circumstances  was  of  a 
cloistral,  academic  kind ;  a  thing  born  of 
theories  and  wanting  in  the  life-blood  of 
the  nation.  The  linguistic  societies  became 
necessarily  closed  corporations  which  troubled 
themselves  little  about  a  merely  hypothetical 
national  literature ;  the  literature  that  in- 
terested them,  could,  in  any  case,  subsist 
perfectly  well  without  a  nation.  Thus  the 
word  Renaissance  in  the  history  of  German 
poetry,  instead  of  connoting  that  fresh, 
youthful  vigour  we  associate  with  the  Renais- 
sance in  France  and  England,  came  to 
mean  something  artificial,  a  hothouse  plant, 
an  experimenting  with  exotic  growths.  This 
is  why  German  Renaissance  poetry  makes  so 
unfresh  an  impression  on  us  to-day  ;  it  was  a 
literature  entirely  devoid  of  the  buoyancy 
of  youth,  a  literature  that  was  born  old. 
Its  cultivation  lay  mainly  in  the  hands  of  a 
group  of  Silesian  writers,  who  drew  their 
doctrines  from  the  French  Renaissance  poets 
of  the  Pleiade.  Martin  Opitz  was  their 


RENAISSANCE   AND    ROCOCO      65 

leader ;  in  five  days  he  wrote  for  them — for 
the  most  part,  it  must  be  confessed,  "  con- 
veyed "  from  Ronsard  and  other  Renaissance 
theorists — an  ars  poetica,  which  was  observed 
with  reverence  by  the  whole  seventeenth 
century,  at  least  so  far  as  the  activity  of 
that  century  lay  within  the  pale  of  recognised 
literature.  Opitz's  Bitch  von  der  deutschen 
Poeterei  (Book  of  German  Poetry)  is  the 
textbook  of  the  German  Renaissance,  and 
according  to  its  maxims  the  poetry  of  the 
movement  was  made.  Opitz  himself — in  spite 
of  a  very  inadequate  talent  and  inspiration 
— was  untiring  in  encouraging  and  aiding  his 
followers.  He  set  them  examples  of  approved 
dramas,  novels  and  lyrics,  and,  unless  in  a 
few  isolated  cases  where  these  followers 
happened  to  be  misled  by  an  obstinate  genius 
that  refused  to  give  implicit  obedience  to  the 
lawgiver,  they  followed  meekly.  It  is  the 
irony  of  literary  history  that  only  these 
disobedient  members  of  the  school  have 
nowadays  a  genuine  interest  for  us  ! 

In  Simon  Dach,  the  gentle,  melancholy  poet 
of  Konigsberg,  we  recognise  a  poet  of  real 
emotional  power ;  in  Paul  Fleming  a  manly, 
vigorous  singer,  whom  Opitzian  formalism 
could  not  silence  or  kill ;  in  Friedrich  von 


66  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

Logau  an  epigrammatist  of  the  very  first  rank, 
the  greatest  the  history  of  German  literature 
can  point  to  ;  and  in  Andreas  Gryphius,  a 
gifted  poet  in  whom  is  seen  only  too  plainly 
the  devastation  worked  in  imaginative  litera- 
ture by  the  dry-as-dust  theorists.  Gryphius 
wrote  lyrics  of  an  intense,  almost  modern 
sincerity  of  feeling,  he  composed — with  help 
in  one  case  from  Shakespeare — two  of  the 
gayest  and  merriest  comedies  of  the  German 
seventeenth  century,  Herr  Peter  Squenz  and 
Horribilicribrifax,  but  he  was  condemned 
by  the  literary  movement  into  which  he 
was  born,  to  waste  his  genius  on  dreary 
alexandrine  tragedies  of  the  approved  Sene- 
can  pattern,  tragedies  reeking  wiih  blood  and 
horrors,  and  without  a  trait  of  real  tragic 
dignity. 

Thus  the  Renaissance  literature  of  Germany 
is  one  long  tragedy  of  the  human  spirit ; 
one  of  the  most  deplorable  perversions  of  a 
nation's  genius  that  history  has  to  tell  of. 
But  there  were  redeeming  features ;  the 
obedience  of  the  Opitzians  to  Opitz  was,  as 
we  have  indicated,  by  no  means  complete  ; 
and  beneath  all  this  formalism  there  was  a 
certain  inarticulate  national  pride  which,  as 
the  dark  days  began  to  pass,  struggled  to 


RENAISSANCE    AND    ROCOCO      67 

expression  again.  In  these  times  of  trouble 
the  German  people  turned  with  redoubled 
zeal  to  their  religious  poetry  ;  and  the  seven- 
teenth century  became  the  great  century  of 
the  German  hymn.  The  hymn  of  this  period 
does  not  differ  very  materially  from  that 
of  the  earlier  days  of  Protestantism,  except 
perhaps  in  so  far  as  it  stands  out  against  a 
more  assured  background  ;  it  is  not  so  persis- 
tently militant,  because  it  no  longer  required 
to  be  so  ;  but  poetically  it  is  characterised  by 
the  same  limitations  of  dogmatic  expression 
as  ever,  the  same  modest  repudiation  of 
subtle  literary  graces.  The  most  gifted  Ger- 
man hymn-writer  of  the  seventeenth  century, 
and  the  most  gifted  Germany  ever  possessed, 
is  Paul  Gerhardt,  who  has  left  a  large  number 
of  hymns  which  belong  to  the  treasured 
possessions  of  the  German  people  ;  Gerhardt's 
poetic  talent  was  not  a  wide  one,  but  he 
was  genuinely  inspired ;  and  his  verse  appeals 
to  us  still  as  the  outcome  of  intense  religious 
conviction. 

In  the  hymn,  German  literature  was  clearly 
once  more  getting  into  touch  with  the  German 
people,  without  whom  the  pure  Renaissance 
literature  had  tried  in  vain  to  live.  But  a 
still  more  hopeful  sign  is  to  be  seen  in 


68  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

the  development  of  the  novel,  as  the  Thirty 
Years'  War  gradually  began  to  spend  its 
force.  The  greatest  German  book  of  the 
seventeenth  century  was  a  novel,  and  a  novel 
of  the  war,  the  Simplicissimus  of  Johann 
Jakob  Christoffel  von  Grimmelshausen.  The 
literary  forebears  of  Simplicissimus  were 
Spanish,  just  as  another  famous  book  reflecting 
the  temper  of  the  people  in  this  unsettled  age, 
the  Gesichte,  or  Visions,  of  Johann  Michael 
Moscherosch  were  founded  on  the  Spanish  Sue- 
nos  (Dreams]  of  Francisco  de  Quevedo.  Sim- 
plicissimus is  a  picaresque  novel,  that  interest- 
ing inversion  of  the  romance  of  chivalry 
which  the  democratic  spirit  had  called  forth 
in  Spain.  It  is  a  story  of  adventure,  of  the 
stormy  life  of  a  soldier  of  fortune  in  a  stormy 
age ;  an  Odyssey  of  the  social  and  moral 
life  of  the  seventeenth  century,  as  Parzival 
had  been  of  the  spiritual  life  of  the  Middle 
Ages  ;  a  book  written  with  abundant  real- 
ism, and  a  record,  as  it  no  doubt  literally  was, 
of  things  seen  and  experienced.  The  artifi- 
cialities of  the  Renaissance  poetics  fade  away 
before  the  healthy  realism  of  these  pictures, 
revolting  as  they  are,  of  seventeenth-century 
barbarism  and  inhumanity  ;  one  feels  that 
literature,  even  if  deficient  in  poetic  style  and 


RENAISSANCE    AND    ROCOCO      69 

delicacy,  was  at  least  again  getting  into 
touch  with  life. 

Grimmelshausen's  novel  remained  more  or 
less  isolated  ;  it  drew  its  life-breath  from  the 
war,  and  when  the  war  was  over,  German 
writers  sought  in  vain  for  any  similar  inspiring 
theme  to  take  its  place.  In  point  of  fact,  the 
long-yearned-for  peace,  the  Peace  of  West- 
phalia in  1648,  arrived  when  the  country  had 
reached  an  apogee  of  depletion  and  exhaustion ; 
long  years  of  convalescence  and  rest  were 
necessary  before  Germany  could  again  assert 
herself  among  the  nations.  The  country  had 
hardly  any  alternative  but  to  sink  into  a 
winter  sleep,  to  wait  patiently  until  a 
new  generation  had  sprung  up,  capable  of 
facing  an  active  life  once  more.  This  explains 
amply  why  Simplicissimus  had  no  successor, 
and  why  the  second  half  of  the  seventeenth 
century,  which  enjoyed  the  blessings  of  peace, 
was  in  literary  respects  of  less  account  than 
the  earlier  half,  which  was  torn  asunder  by 
war.  Such  literature  as  these  years  produced 
could  take  no  root  in  the  inert  national  life  ; 
and  it  had  recourse  once  more  to  those  artifi- 
cialities which  had  been  cultivated  abroad. 

German  Renaissance  literature  was  com- 
pelled to  go  through  the  same  stages  of  growth 


70  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

and  decay  as  the  similar  movement  in  other 
lands.  After  the  First  Silesian  School — as  the 
group  of  writers  who  drew  inspiration  from 
Opitz  is  usually  called — with  their  imitation  of 
the  early  Italian  and  French  imitations  of 
classic  literature,  came  the  Second  Silesian 
School,  which  stands  in  a  relation  to  its  prede- 
cessor, exactly  analogous  to  that  in  which  the 
productions  of  Marini  and  Gongora  in  the 
South  of  Europe,  or  the  precieuses  ridicules 
of  France,  stood  to  the  earlier  stage  of 
Renaissance  development.  The  analogy  is 
no  fanciful  one,  for  the  German  writers  of 
the  later  seventeenth  century  learned  directly 
from  their  Latin  neighbours.  Caspar  von 
Lohenstein  wrote  cold  Senecan  dramas,  quite 
as  full  chambers  of  horrors  as  anything  in 
France  or  Italy ;  and  Christian  Hofmann 
von  Hofmannswaldau  yielded  to  the  siren 
voices  of  a  mellifluous  Italian  sensuality. 
While,  however,  verbal  beauty  afforded  some 
excuse  for  the  concetti  of  the  Italians,  the 
harsher  German  speech  in  its  efforts  at 
imitation  only  made  itself  ridiculous,  and 
degenerated  at  once  into  vulgar  rodomontades 
and  bombast.  From  France  came  the  novel 
of  heroic  adventure,  that  last  stage  in  the 
decay  of  knightly  story  ;  and  the  heroic  novel 


RENAISSANCE   AND    ROCOCO     71 

proved  an  insidious  enemy  of  the  new  fiction 
which  Grimmelshausen  had  inaugurated.  In- 
flated speech,  impossible  actions,  highly 
coloured  exoticism,  sensual  titillation,  took 
the  place,  in  the  Asiatische  Banise,  Romische 
Octavia,  and  similar  many-volumed  gal- 
lant novels  of  this  age,  of  the  plain  and 
simple  truth,  the  straightforward,  convincing 
chronicle  of  Simplicissimus.  The  German 
people,  like  every  other  people  in  Europe  at 
this  time,  lost  the  taste  for  the  beauty  of 
reality,  and  could  only  find  interest  in  books 
where  the  colours  were  heightened  and  the 
sentiment  falsified.  This  symptom  was  the 
first  decisive  warning  of  Renaissance  decay  ; 
and  Germany  suffered  perhaps  more  than 
any  other  people  under  it,  for  she  was  in- 
tellectually so  weak,  and  so  much  at  its  mercy. 
The  only  redeeming  feature  of  this  literature 
of  Renaissance  decay  in  Germany  is  the  slight 
tinge  of  national  history  which  Lohenstein 
infused  into  his  heroic  novel  of  ancient 
German  history,  Hermann  und  Thusnelda ; 
for  the  rest,  the  German  novel  had  reached  a 
hopeless  deadlock. 

The  first  signs  of  a  return  to  health  came 
in  the  early  years  of  the  eighteenth  century 
from  England  with  the  Spectator  and  with 


72  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

Defoe's  Robinson  Crusoe,  which  at  one  stroke 
opened  the  eyes  of  the  world  to  the  superior 
beauty  of  reality.  Before  the  solitary 
English  mariner,  struggling  single-handed 
against  the  powers  of  nature,  the  whole 
phantasmagoria  of  exotic  heroes  and  heroines 
undergoing  incredible  sufferings  and  fighting 
against  incredible  odds,  faded  away.  Just  as 
the  heroic  novel  coming  irom  France  had 
found  the  depleted  Germany  an  easy  prey,  so 
Robinson  Criisoe,  coming  from  England,  took 
a  firmer  hold  on  the  German  mind  than  on 
that  of  any  other  continental  people,  and  the 
imitations  of  Defoe's  great  novel  in  Germany 
were  numbered  by  hundreds. 

But  there  were  other  signs  of  returning 
health  in  this  dark  age  of  Germany's  spiritual 
life.  The  artificial  phase  of  pastoral  exaggera- 
tion, which  has  left  a  characteristic  stamp  on 
the  Dresden  china  of  the  time,  was  yielding  in 
every  land  in  Europe  before  a  healthier 
neo-classicism  ;  the  rococo  went  down  before 
the  soberer  spirit  of  Descartes  and  the  respect 
for  reason.  A  new  stage  of  Renaissance 
evolution  arose  in  France  with  Boileau  as  its 
prophet  and  the  great  masters  of  French 
tragedy  as  its  exemplars  ;  and  this  could  not 
fail  to  find  an  echo  in  Germany.  Precisely 


RENAISSANCE   AND   ROCOCO     73 

as  in  Italy  and  as  in  France,  the  claims  of 
reason  and  what  the  reformers  regarded  as 
"  truth  to  nature  "  were  vindicated.  A  new 
group  of  poets  arose  whose  war-cry,  as  that 
of  new  literary  movements  usually  is,  was 
"  return  to  nature,"  but  whose  practice, 
unfortunately,  was  slavish  imitation  of  the 
French.  The  vitiated  Italian  and  Spanish 
influence  gave  place  at  the  beginning  of  the 
eighteenth  century  in  Germany  to  French 
influence ;  and  for  the  first  forty  years  of  that 
century  Germany  contributed  her  very  modest 
share  to  the  European  classicism,  which  had 
reached  its  zenith  in  France  under  Louis  XIV. 
The  poets  of  this  phase  are  frankly  beneath 
notice  ;  the  only  one  indeed  who  has  a  claim 
on  our  attention  was  the  unhappy  rebel  of 
the  movement,  Johann  Christian  Giinther, 
who  was  too  genuine  a  lyric  poet  to  be  able 
to  adapt  himself  to  the  rule  of  thumb  which 
his  fellows  obeyed. 

Like  all  organised  movements,  this  first 
classic  phase  in  German  eighteenth-century 
literature  had  a  leader,  and  that  leader, 
Gottsched,  may  be  taken  as  its  representative. 
Johann  Christoph  Gottsched  was  the  literary 
dictator  of  Germany  in  the  pseudo-classic 
age ;  he  made  Leipzig  the  Paris  of  the  move- 


74  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

ment,  the  seat  of  his  Academy,  the  "  Deutsch- 
iibende  Gesellschaft."  He  was  to  this  stage  of 
the  Renaissance  movement  exactly  what 
Opitz  had  been  to  the  earlier  one ;  he  gave 
it  its  textbook,  in  his  famous  and  often 
reprinted  Kritische  Dichtkunst  fur  die  Deut- 
schen  (Critical  Poetics  for  the  Germans,  1730). 
Here  were  laid  down  the  rules  of  literary 
conduct  for  a  generation  that  could  not  move 
a  step  without  such  rules ;  here  the  age 
found  conveniently  docketed  its  receipts  for 
manufacturing  epics  and  tragedies,  fables, 
epigrams  and  comedies.  And  the  acceptance 
of  these  receipts  relieved  the  users  of  them 
from  a  vast  amount  of  literary  responsibility. 
They  knew  they  were  doing  the  right  thing, 
could  depend  on  the  approbation  of  the  critics, 
and  the  rest  did  not  matter.  Above  all, 
Gottsched,  mindful  of  Boileau's  advice  to 
"  love  reason,"  expressly  warned  them  against 
allowing  that  subtle  enemy  of  reasonableness, 
the  imagination,  to  get  the  upper  hand  in 
their  works.  Precisely  as  Opitz  had  proceeded 
from  theory  to  practice,  so  Gottsched  followed 
up  his  theoretical  textbook  with  a  collection 
of  plays,  Die  deutsche  Schaubuhne  nach  den 
Eegeln  der  alien  Griechen  und  Homer  eingerichtct 
(The  German  Theatre,  arranged  according 


RENAISSANCE   AND   ROCOCO     75 

to  the  rules  of  the  ancient  Greeks  and  Romans), 
which  was  to  provide  the  reformed  theatre 
with  a  repertory.  These  plays  were  mostly 
translations,  by  Gottsched's  disciples  and  by 
his  gifted  wife,  Luise  Adelgunde,  of  the  master- 
pieces of  French  classic  drama.  Gottsched 
himself  rose  to  a  certain  poetic  originality 
with  his  tragedy  Der  sterbende  Cato  (The  Dying 
Cato),  which  ingeniously  combined  the  excell- 
ence of  its  models,  plays  by  Addison  and 
Deschamps.  Indifferent  as  was  the  poetic 
outcome  of  Gottsched's  activity,  he  at  least 
succeeded  in  establishing  French  taste  in  the 
German  theatre  and  in  raising  the  status  of 
the  theatre  as  an  institution.  In  later  life, 
when  Gottsched's  ideals  of  a  German  national 
literature  had  been  discredited,  he  concen- 
trated his  attention  to  the  reform  of  the 
German  language  and  the  normalisation  of 
German  grammar,  orthography  and  style. 
The  value  of  his  services  in  this  field  is 
nowadays  unduly  overlooked.  Gottsched's 
autocracy  was,  in  the  main,  restricted  to 
Leipzig.  Hamburg,  for  instance,  in  the  north- 
west was  hardly  influenced  by  it  at  all ; 
writers  there,  like  Barthold  Heinrich  Brockes, 
passed  directly  from  an  activity  in  accordance 
with  the  tenets  of  the  Second  Silesian  School, 


76  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

to  an  imitation  of  English  models.  Friedrich 
von  Hagedorn,  again,  Hamburg's  represen- 
tative poet  in  this  age,  grew  up  almost 
exclusively  under  the  influence  of  English 
literature,  and  although  his  poetry  has  little 
of  the  freer  spirit  of  the  "  return  to  nature  " 
as  exemplified  in  poets  like  Thomson,  it  is 
independent  of  the  classicism  of  Leipzig. 

Such  was  the  condition  of  German  letters 
at  the  opening  of  the  eighteenth  century. 
From  Opitz  to  Gottsched,  the  Germans  passed 
through  the  same  phases  of  Renaissance 
development  as  are  to  be  found  in  other 
European  literatures  ;  but  the  real  meaning 
of  this  evolution  did  not  become  clear  to 
them  until  the  age  of  Lessing,  Goethe  and 
Schiller,  who  brought  not  only  the  German 
classic  movement  to  a  climax,  but  also  the 
whole  Renaissance  movement  of  Europe. 


CHAPTER   IV 

THE   AGE   OF   CLASSIC   ACHIEVEMENT 

THE  most  marvellous  thing  about  the  eigh- 
teenth century,  the  threshold  of  which  we 
have  already  reached,  is  the  rapidity  of  its 
development.  If  we  compare  the  state  of 
Germany's  literature — we  will  not  say  in 
1700 — but  at  the  accession  of  Frederick  the 
Great  in  1740,  when  all  Europe  was  agreed 
that  the  Germans,  as  a  literature-producing 
people,  were  of  no  consequence  at  all,  with 
the  conditions  in  the  year  1800,  when  the 
nation  stood  in  the  vanguard  of  the  intel- 
lectual and  poetic  movement,  we  are  con- 
fronted with  a  miracle  of  recuperative  power 
which  has  not  its  parallel  in  any  other  modern 
literature.  It  is  our  business  in  the  present 
chapter  to  try  to  understand  how  this  miracle 
was  wrought. 

In  the  preceding  chapter  we  saw  how 
German  Renaissance  poetry  repeated  in  a 
listless,  ineffectual  way  the  process  of  evolu- 

77 


78  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

tion  through  which  all  Renaissance  poetry 
had  to  pass  ;  the  eighteenth  century  continued 
this  process,  but  with  a  material  difference. 
In  the  earlier  time  Germany  was  content  to 
follow  humbly  in  the  steps  of  her  Latin 
neighbours ;  before  the  eighteenth  century 
was  very  far  advanced,  she  assumed  the 
leadership.  Between  1700  and  1740  she  had 
succeeded,  with  infinite  labour  and  dispro- 
portionately small  results,  in  bringing  her 
literature  abreast  of  that  stage  of  Renaissance 
evolution  which  we  associate  with  the  French 
seventeenth  century ;  this,  as  we  have  seen, 
was  Gottsched's  standpoint.  But  very  shortly 
after  the  middle  of  the  century,  men  like 
Winkelmann  and  Lessing  initiated  in  Germany 
a  new  phase  of  Renaissance  classicism,  which 
marked  a  greater  advance  over  French  pseudo- 
classicism — upheld  in  France  with  brilliant 
Sclat  by  Lessing' s  great  opponent,  Voltaire — 
than  the  French  classic  literature  was  an 
advance  upon  the  early  Renaissance  literature. 
Winkelmann  and  Lessing  led  the  Germans 
back  from  a  false,  artificial  classicism  to  a  true 
classicism,  that  is  to  say,  to  a  classicism  that 
drew  direct  inspiration  from  the  masterworks 
of  antiquity  and  more  especially  of  Greece. 
But  this  was  not  all.  The  last  quarter  of 


AGE   OF    CLASSIC    ACHIEVEMENT   79 

the  eighteenth  century  witnessed  a  further 
advance  on  the  part  of  the  classic  movement. 
Other  peoples,  even  if  they  had  neither  a 
Winkelmann  nor  a  Lessing,  contributed  in- 
dependently to  the  movement  inaugurated  by 
these  men ;  but  the  classicism  to  which 
Goethe  and  Schiller  rose  in  Weimar  in  the 
years  of  their  maturity  was  an  achievement 
the  credit  of  which  belongs  exclusively  to 
Germany.  This  final  phase  of  classicism, 
which  has  been  well  described  as  the  highest 
in  the  long  development  of  Renaissance 
ideas,  accepted  the  basis  of  aesthetic  classicism 
the  earlier  pioneers  had  laid  down,  but  grafted 
on  to  it  a  new  ethical  element.  The  classicism 
of  Weimar,  the  ripest  product  of  eighteenth 
century  Enlightenment,  was  a  Greek  classi- 
cism plus  a  great  humanitarian  ideal. 

How  are  we  to  explain  this  remarkable 
start  which  the  Germans  of  the  eighteenth 
century  obtained  over  other  nations,  admitted- 
ly far  better  equipped  than  they  to  assume 
the  intellectual  hegemony  in  Europe  ?  Nations 
often  rise  to  intellectual  supremacy  on  great 
political  and  national  movements  ;  but  such 
was  not  the  case  in  Germany.  One  cannot 
honestly  say  that  the  Germans  of  the  eigh- 
teenth century  owed  anything  particularly 


80  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

inspiriting  or  inspiring  to  their  political  life ; 
they  were  emphatically  not  a  political  people, 
not  even  a  nation  at  all,  if  "  nation  "  implies  a 
common  political  aim.  The  pride  of  nation 
engendered  by  Frederick  in  Prussia  was  of 
far  less  significance  to  German  literature  than 
that  vague,  big-hearted  cosmopolitanism  of 
the  eighteenth  century,  which  had  nothing 
to  do  with  national  politics  and  looked 
upon  all  Europe  as  one  common  fatherland. 
Frederick  the  Great  was  a  passing  tonic  to 
German  poetry,  but  little  more.  Nor  can  one 
discover  in  Germany's  social  life,  in  the 
undercurrents  of  her  intellectual  life,  or  in  her 
educational  system  any  very  cogent  ground 
for  her  rapid  advance.  Socially  speaking, 
the  Germans  of  the  eighteenth  century  were 
merged  in  a  trivial  provincialism  which  could 
hardly  have  been  paralleled  in  the  life  of 
France  and  England  at  the  time  ;  for  Germany 
was  a  nation  without  a  capital,  and  the  in- 
tellectual salvation  of  England  and  France 
in  the  eighteenth  century  came  from  Londoa 
and  Paris.  Educationally,  again,  in  spite  of 
much  that  was  of  good  augury  for  the  future, 
one  can  hardly  say  that  the  Germans  had  any 
points  of  superiority  over  their  neighbours ; 
and  as  for  intellectual  undercurrents,  the 


AGE   OF   CLASSIC   ACHIEVEMENT   81 

magnificent  promise  of  Leibniz  at  the 
beginning  of  the  century  was  not  really 
fulfilled  until  the  appearance  of  Kant's  great 
philosophical  treatises,  after  the  classical 
period  of  the  literature  had  been  already 
established. 

And  yet  in  spite  of  all  these  disadvantages, 
there  was  a  pronounced  quickening  of  German 
intellectual  life  as  the  century  progressed,  an 
increasing  sensitiveness  to  aesthetic  impressions 
and  receptiveness  to  outside  ideas  ;  and  if  we 
look  more  closely  into  the  character  of  this 
German  advance,  we  begin  to  discover  cer- 
tain peculiarities  about  it  which  are  lacking,  or 
but  indifferently  represented,  in  similar  con- 
temporary movements  in  other  lands.  To 
begin  with,  the  process  of  development  was 
one  of  oscillation  from  one  extreme  to  another. 
Between  the  pseudo-classicism  of  Gottsched 
and  the  "  Greek  "  classicism  of  Lessing  lay 
an  unclassic  outburst  of  German  individualism, 
which  found  its  chief  expression,  as  all 
German  individualism  does,  in  lyric  poetry, 
namely,  the  lyric  of  Klopstock  and  his  friends ; 
and  between  the  classicism  of  Lessing  and  the 
humane  ideals  of  Weimar  the  German  spirit 
passed  through  the  most  intense  period  of 
subjectivity  which  is  to  be  found  in  its  whole 


82   THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

history,  the  period  of  "  Storm  and  Stress." 
In  fact,  we  gradually  begin  to  see  that  it  was 
not  the  classicism  of  Germany's  classic  period 
that  really  mattered  to  the  Germans,  but 
the  intervening  moments  of  anti-classicism; 
and  the  advance  of  one  classic  period  over  the 
other  was  due,  less  to  the  natural  growth  of 
the  classic  idea  than  to  the  buffeting,  moulding 
and  adapting  of  classicism  during  the  inter- 
vening periods  of  revolt.  Lessing's  classicism 
arose,  for  instance,  out  of  his  antagonism  to 
Voltaire  and  his  repugnance  to  the  hollow 
artificiality  of  pseudo-classicism ;  Goethe's, 
again,  was  influenced  by  that  intensely 
subjective  stage  in  his  early  development, 
which  revealed  to  him  the  insufficiency  of  the 
rationalistic  classicism  of  Lessing.  And  great 
as  was  the  ultimate  achievement  of  German 
classical  literature,  the  last  word  lay  not  with 
classicism  but  with  its  antithesis ;  for,  at 
the  moment  when  Goethe  and  Schiller  had 
reached  the  very  zenith  of  their  activity, 
another  revulsion  set  in  in  Germany  which 
was  far  more  far-reaching  in  its  effects  than 
anything  that  had  gone  before  ;  in  1798  the 
Romantic  School  was  founded,  and  it  imbued 
the  whole  nineteenth  century — and  not  in 
Germany  alone — with  its  subjective  attitude 


AGE    OF   CLASSIC   ACHIEVEMENT   83 

towards  art.  But  to  Romanticism  we  have 
to  return  in  a  subsequent  chapter. 

The  earlier  phases  of  German  eighteenth- 
century  literature  may  be  dealt  with  briefly 
here.  Gottsched,  whom  we  left  in  the  pre- 
vious chapter  in  undisputed  possession  of  the 
field,  came  suddenly  and  unexpectedly  into 
conflict  with  the  new  spirit  in  the  year  1740, 
when  two  Zurich  critics,  Johann  Jakob  Bodmer 
and  Johann  Jakob  Breitinger  entered  the  field 
as  champions  of  ideas  which,  originating  in 
England,  had  already  been  spreading,  with  the 
help  of  translations  of  the  Spectator,  to  the 
Continent.  To  the  claims  of  French  classicism 
that  Cartesian  clarte  and  reasonableness  should 
be  the  guiding  factors  of  literature,  these  men 
opposed  a  demand  that  the  imagination 
should  be  the  supreme  factor  in  poetry.  The 
French  "  battle  of  the  ancients  and  the 
moderns "  was  thus  fought  over  again  on 
German  soil,  and,  if  anything,  with  keener 
weapons  and  more  decisive  results.  From 
this  battle  the  Swiss  party,  who  had  inscribed 
Milton's  name  on  their  banner,  emerged 
triumphant.  The  fetters  were  removed  from 
the  German  imagination,  and  the  way  was 
prepared  for  a  German  Milton. 

Friedrich  Gottlieb  Klopstock  published  the 


84  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

first  three  cantos  of  his  epic  Der  Messias 
(The  Messiah)  in  1748,  and  German  poetry 
made  an  enormous  stride  forwards.  Not 
merely  was  Gottsched  dethroned  from  his 
dictator's  chair,  but  even  the  less  uncom- 
promising Leipzig  litterateurs,  who  had  in 
their  beginnings  gathered  round  him,  men 
like  the  gentle  satirist  Gottlieb  Wilhelm 
Rabener,  the  amiable  fabulist,  Christian 
Fiirchtegott  Gellert,  and  the  critic  and  drama- 
tist, Johann  Elias  Schlegel — the  one  writer  of 
this  generation  who  may  be  fairly  claimed 
as  a  predecessor  of  Lessing — found  themselves 
no  longer  in  the  vanguard  of  the  movement. 
Klopstock  was  the  man  of  the  hour,  the 
practical  illustration  of  the  Swiss  theories.  It 
is,  of  course,  very  easy  nowadays  for  us,  who 
find  Der  Messias  the  dullest  of  dull  reading, 
to  say :  a  Milton  indeed,  a  very  German 
Milton  !  But  intrinsic  worth  is  not  always 
the  measure  by  which  the  significance  of  any 
particular  piece  of  imaginative  literature  for 
a  nation's  evolution  may  be  estimated  ;  and 
from  this  point  of  view  Klopstock's  epic,  not- 
withstanding its  undramatic,  "  blurred  "  re- 
production of  the  last  stages  of  the  gospel 
story,  and  still  more  his  lyric  Odes,  couched, 
as  they  mostly  are,  in  artificial,  un-German 


AGE   OF   CLASSIC   ACHIEVEMENT   85 

metres,  played  a  role  of  the  very  first  import- 
ance in  the  building  of  German  classic  litera- 
ture. Klopstock  is  the  first  of  the  great 
liberators  of  the  German  spirit ;  his  work 
stands  for  emancipation  from  the  fetters  of 
classic  rule,  and  for  the  triumph  of  German 
individualism  ;  and  the  movement  initiated 
by  him  was  reinforced  by  other  factors  in  the 
national  life.  It  coincided  with  the  awaken- 
ing of  national  self-respect  in  North  Germany 
under  the  influence  of  Frederick  the  Great's 
personality  and  military  zeal ;  it  drew  strength 
from  the  newly-born  interest  in  the  remote 
past  of  the  Germanic  races,  which  had  been 
stimulated  by  translations  of  Ossian — then 
believed  to  have  been  a  kind  of  ancient  Teu- 
tonic "bard  " — and  from  the  analogous  interest 
in  the  Percy  Ballads,  which  appealed  particu- 
larly to  the  Germans  as  a  manifestation  of  the 
virile  untutored  imagination  of  the  "  Volk." 

As  has  been  already  indicated,  Frederick 
the  Great's  influence  on  German  poetry  was 
disappointing.  We  have,  it  is  true,  Goethe's 
word  for  it  that  Frederick  gave  "  body  "  to 
the  new  poetry  ;  but  one  can  only  say  in  a 
very  restricted  sense  that  it  inspired  it. 
the  war-songs  which  celebrated  Frederick's 
victories,  such  as  Gleim's  Lieder  eines  preus- 


86  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

sischen  Grenadiers,  sound  very  hollow  and 
insincere  nowadays,  and  the  poetry  composed 
by  other  writers  who  fell  under  the  classic 
influence  of  the  Prussian  Court,  rises  occasion- 
ally to  distinction  only  in  spite  of  that  influence. 
No  one  reads  Karl  Wilhelm  Ramler's  cold, 
classic  odes  to-day,  and  Ewald  Christian  von 
Kleist  interests  us,  not  as  a  classic  poet,  but 
as  one  who,  in  his  Der  Fruhling  (Spring),  had 
learnt  to  see  nature  with  Thomson's  eyes. 
However  Frederick  may  have  inspired  the 
literature  of  his  people,  he  played  no  role 
comparable  to  that  of  our  Queen  Elizabeth ; 
we  doubt  even  if  his  influence  was  greater 
than  that  of  other  German  rulers  of  the  eigh- 
teenth and  early  nineteenth  centuries.  What 
German  poetry  achieved  under  Frederick  the 
Great,  who  himself  spoke  and  wrote  French 
in  preference  to  German,  and  who  had  only 
contempt  for  the  language  and  literature  of  his 
people,  was  virtually  achieved  in  spite  of  him. 
After  Klopstock  came  Lessing.  Of  all  the 
German  writers  of  the  eighteenth  century, 
Lessing  is  the  one  whom  we  in  England  have 
received  with  most  unmixed  sympathy  and 
fullest  understanding ;  his  great  qualities  are 
all  qualities  which  we,  as  a  nation,  can 
appreciate.  He  was  an  inveterate  enemy  of 


AGE   OF   CLASSIC   ACHIEVEMENT   87 

intellectual  darkness,  a  champion  of  freedom 
of  thought ;  a  great  fighter  for  noble, 
unselfish  ends.  As  a  critic — and  it  is  as  a 
critic  that  his  lustre  has  perhaps  remained 
brightest — he  attacked  the  inaccurate  scholar- 
ship of  his  time  ;  he  pled  for  the  greatness 
of  Greek  literature,  reinstated  Aristotle  as  the 
supreme  arbiter  of  dramatic  taste  ;  and,  on  the 
firm  basis  of  this  newer  and  more  correct 
understanding,  he  championed  Shakespeare 
against  the  French  critics  who  had  found  the 
English  poet  sadly  deficient  according  to 
their  interpretations  of  Aristotle's  doctrine. 
Thus,  although  Lessing's  criticism  was  a 
reversion  to  classicism,  his  classicism  was 
consistent  with  a  wide  and  catholic  outlook 
on  literature  ;  one  that  had  room  in  it  for 
Shakespeare  and  the  Spanish  dramatists,  as 
well  as  for  Sophocles ;  his  classicism,  in  other 
words,  had  benefited  by  the  widening  process 
of  the  anti-classic  revolt  that  lay  between  it 
and  the  preceding  classic  movement  associated 
with  Gottsched.  Another  valuable  aspect 
of  Lessing's  criticism  is  to  be  seen  in  his 
treatise  on  the  limitations  of  poetry  and 
painting,  the  Laokoon.  Here  he  appears 
as  a  fellow- worker  by  the  side  of  Winkelmann, 
who  in  his  History  of  Ancient  Art,  had 


88  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

proclaimed  the  Greeks  the  unsurpassed 
masters ;  and  from  this  standpoint  Lessing 
set  down  the  lines  beyond  which  a  symbolic 
sculpture  and  a  pictorial  poetry  might  not  go. 
Lessing,  however,  was  more  than  a  critic ; 
he  was  Germany's  first  great  dramatist.  He 
began,  as  a  young  student  in  Leipzig,  like  every 
other  Gottschedian,  as  an  imitator  of  the  then 
popular  French  playwrights,  Destouches  and 
Marivaux  ;  and  all  his  earlier  plays  show  this 
influence,  tempered,  it  may  be,  by  the  more 
thorough  study  of  antique  comedy.  In  1755 
he  produced  what  was  for  Germany  the  most 
epoch-making  drama  in  the  whole  history  of 
her  literature,  Miss  Sara  Sampson.  This 
remarkable  play  is  not,  however,  very  original, 
being  an  imitation  of  Lillo's  Merchant  of 
London,  supplemented  by  other  ingredients 
of  unmistakable  English  origin  ;  but  it  was  the 
first  German  "  biirgerliche  Trauerspiel,"  or 
"  tragedy  of  common  life  "  ;  with  it  this  new 
form  of  tragedy,  the  special  pride  of  the 
eighteenth  century,  was  adopted  by  the 
German  people,  and  it  has  remained,  down 
to  the  present  day,  one  of  their  favourite 
forms  of  dramatic  expression. 

Lessing  followed  up  Miss  Sara  with  three 
dramatic  works,  all  of  the  first  importance: 


AGE   OF   CLASSIC   ACHIEVEMENT   89 

Minna  von  Barnhelm,  the  best  German 
comedy  of  the  eighteenth  century,  in  which 
the  Frederician  era  is  mirrored  as  in  no  other 
German  work ;  Emilia  Galotti,  where  the 
"  domestic "  tragedy  is  raised  to  a  higher 
poetic  level,  and  points  out  the  way  which  the 
tragedy  of  the  following  period  was  to  follow  ; 
lastly,  Nathan  der  Weise,  in  which  Lessing 
embodied  his  own  ideal  of  a  classic  poetic 
drama  which  should  take  the  place  of  the 
more  artificial  tragedy  of  Voltaire.  But  Nathan 
is  at  the  same  time  an  epitome,  transfigured 
by  the  optimism  of  rationalism,  of  the  great 
struggle  for  religious  tolerance,  which  darkened 
the  poet's  own  closing  years. 

So  far  then,  Lessing  represents  an  element 
in  German  literature  which  made  for  stability  ; 
but  German  individualism  has  always  been 
too  intractable  a  force  to  be  kept  in  check 
by  mere  law-givers.  Moreover,  the  disturbing 
forces  in  German  literature,  shortly  after 
the  middle  of  the  eighteenth  century,  were 
peculiarly  disquieting  ;  a  still  greater  revolu- 
tion was  portending,  a  still  more  complete 
break  with  the  even  tenor  of  Renaissance 
classicism.  At  an  earlier  stage  the  friends 
of  law  and  order  in  poetry  had  had  the  moral 
help  of  France,  but  now  there  arose  in 


90  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

France  itself  a  thinker  who  in  the  most  direct 
way  fomented  the  rebellion  in  Germany. 
This  was  Rousseau.  The  forces  which  had 
already  been  called  into  life  by  Klopstock 
were  reinforced  tenfold,  and  Lessing  himself 
despaired  of  the  future  when  he  saw  the 
"  Storm  and  Stress  "  break  over  Germany. 
But  before  we  consider  this  movement,  we 
have  to  look  to  a  writer  who,  in  his  own 
way,  helped  materially  to  keep  his  country- 
men from  losing  their  balance  entirely  over 
Klopstock  and  Rousseau. 

This,  the  third  outstanding  writer  of  the 
German  eighteenth  century,  is  Christoph 
Martin  Wieland.  Wieland  was  a  Swabian 
with  as  few  of  the  characteristics  we  usually 
associate  with  this  German  race  as  that  other 
great  Swabian,  Schiller.  One  cannot  say 
that  Wieland,  like  Lessing,  opposed  the 
fervour  and  enthusiasm  of  his  time  with  a 
measured,  antique  classicism  ;  his  classicism, 
such  as  it  was,  was  rather  an  aggravated  form 
of  pseudo-classicism.  What  he  did  introduce 
into  German  poetry  was  a  Latin  gaiety, 
hitherto  foreign  to  it ;  something  of  the 
spirit  of  the  French  social  poets,  or  of  Italians 
like  Ariosto.  He  met  excessive  manifesta- 
tions of  feeling  with  cynicism  and  raillery ; 


AGE    OF    CLASSIC   ACHIEVEMENT   91 

he  told  sunny  tales  of  gay  adventure — 
Musarion,  Gandalin,  Oberon — the  seriousness 
of  which  was  never  really  serious  ;  and  he 
preached  a  light-hearted,  cynical  philosophy 
of  enjoying  to-day  and  letting  to-morrow 
look  after  itself,  which  counteracted  in  some 
measure  the  solemnity  and  intensity  of  the 
new  school.  This  by  no  means  exhausts 
Wieland's  many-sided  activity.  He  did  valiant 
work  by  adapting,  in  his  Agathon,  the  new 
kind  of  fiction  invented  by  Richardson  and 
cultivated  in  England,  to  German  needs ; 
and  it  must  never  be  forgotten  that  he  gave 
Germany  her  first  translation  of  Shakespeare. 
He  is  hardly  a  writer  we  care  to  read  nowadays, 
but  even  if  we  are  obliged  to  admit  that  his 
literary  work  was  chiefly  valuable  in  a  negative 
way,  he  filled  an  indispensable  niche  in  the 
structure  of  German  eighteenth-century  litera- 
ture. 

But  the  coming  of  the  "  Storm  and  Stress  " 
was  inevitable  ;  the  new  individualism  could 
not  be  dammed  back.  Lessing's  warnings 
and  pleas  for  imaginative  orderliness  went 
unheeded ;  and  in  the  early  seventies  the 
deluge  broke  over  Germany.  The  genesis 
of  the  movement  is  interesting  enough  to  be 
looked  at  in  some  detail. 


92  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

The  spiritual  progenitor  of  German  "  Storm 
and  Stress  "  was  Johann  Friedrich  Herder,  who 
Was  a  much  more  important  force  in  German 
intellectual  life  than  the  comparatively 
small  popularity  of  his  fragmentary  and 
formless  writings  might  lead  us  to  think.  He 
was  a  man  of  extraordinarily  fertile  ideas,  and 
ideas  fraught  with  far-reaching  significance 
for  the  future.  For  the  first  time,  for  instance, 
we  find  clearly  propounded  in  his  works  the 
significant  doctrine  of  historical  evolution ; 
filled  with  a  Rousseau-like  enthusiasm,  he 
sought  the  key  to  the  secrets  of  history  in  the 
cradle  of  our  race.  But  other  forces  were 
at  work  in  Herder  besides  the  influence  of 
Rousseau  ;  in  early  life  he  had  been  introduced 
to  English  literature  and,  above  all,  to 
Shakespeare  by  an  eccentric  pioneer  of  the 
new  individualism,  Johann  Georg  Hamann 
— the  "  Wizard  of  the  North,"  as  his  country- 
men called  him — and  from  this  time  on  the 
ties  that  bound  Herder  to  English  litera- 
ture strongly  influenced  his  activity.  The 
supremely  interesting  moment  in  Herder's 
career  was,  when,  as  tutor  to  two  travelling 
noblemen,  he  came  to  Strassburg.  Before 
this  he  had  made  himself  known  to  the 
younger  generation  by  a  volume  of  suggestive 


AGE    OF   CLASSIC   ACHIEVEMENT   93 

criticism,  Fragmente  uber  die  neuere  deutsche 
Literatur  (Fragments  on  Modern  German 
Literature),  in  which  the  new  anti-classic 
and  also,  to  some  extent,  anti-Lessing  stand- 
point found  expression.  Goethe,  then  a 
young  student  in  Strassburg,  was  eager  to 
make  his  acquaintance.  The  two  men  met, 
and  in  days  spent  together,  while  Herder  was 
undergoing  an  operation  on  his  eye,  they 
virtually  formulated  the  doctrine  of  the  new 
movement  which  was  called  by  after  genera- 
tions the  "  Sturm  und  Drang,"  or  "  Storm  and 
Stress."  In  1772  appeared  a  little  volume 
of  essays  by  various  hands,  Goethe's  and 
Herder's  amongst  others,  called  Von  deutscher 
Art  und  Kunst  (On  German  Ways  and  Art], 
the  manifesto  of  the  literary  revolution. 

There  are  two  chief  divisions  in  the  move- 
ment of  "  Storm  and  Stress,"  one  a  dominantly 
lyric  one,  which  went  back  to  Klopstock  as  the 
head-spring  of  its  inspiration,  the  other,  in 
which  the  drama  was  almost  exclusively 
cultivated.  The  lyric  "  Storm  and  Stress " 
was  more  particularly  associated  with  the 
university  town  of  Gottingen.  Here  a  group 
of  young  students  banded  themselves  together 
into  a  school  or  "  Dichterbund,"  and  pub- 
lished their  poetry  in  an  almanack  of  their 


94  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

own,  the  so-called  Gottinger  Musenalmanach 
This  group  numbered  among  its  members 
Johann  Heinrich  Voss,  the  admirable  trans- 
lator of  Homer  and  the  author  of  charming 
original  idylls,  notably  Luise — which  sub- 
sequently served  Goethe  as  a  model  for  his 
Hermann  und  Dorothea — a  poem  in  which 
Homeric  naivete  and  simplicity  are  adapted, 
a  little  crudely  it  may  be,  to  a  German 
provincial  theme  ;  Ludwig  Holty,  a  gentle, 
elegiac  singer  of  great  gifts,  cut  off  in  early 
youth ;  Matthias  Claudius,  a  representative  of 
the  unsophisticated  literature  of  the  people; 
and,  most  important  of  all,  Germany's 
greatest  ballad  poet,  Gottfried  August  Burger. 
In  the  poetry  of  these  men  is  to  be  found 
reflected  all  the  unsettling  tendencies  of  the 
age :  the  fervour  of  Klopstock,  the  in- 
vigorating contact  with  the  people  and  the 
mother-earth,  the  delight  in  the  folk-song  and 
the  ballad,  which  the  Germans  had,  as  has 
been  seen,  learned  from  the  Percy  Ballads, 
the  Romantic  mystery  and  mysticism  of 
Ossian.  Nor  is  the  note  of  political  aspiration 
absent,  the  craving  for  personal  freedom,  a 
side  of  the  movement  which  appears  to  best 
advantage  in  the  poetry  of  the  brothers  Graf 
Christian  and  Graf  Friedrich  zu  Stollberg. 


AGE    OF   CLASSIC   ACHIEVEMENT   95 

Burger's  great  ballads,  again,  such  as  Lenore 
and  Der  wilde  Jager  (The  Wild  Huntsman), 
were  defiant  protests  against  the  artificialities 
of  classic  poetry,  just  as  his  unhappy  life 
was  one  long,  tragic  protest  against  the  con- 
ventional moral  code  of  the  age.  Lenore,  in 
particular,  was  a  work  of  European  signific- 
ance hardly  less  far-reaching  than  that  of 
Goethe's  Werther  itself. 

But  the  main  current  of  "  Storm  and 
Stress  "  sought  the  more  congenial  channel 
of  the  theatre.  In  the  year  1773,  Goethe, 
then  a  youth  of  twenty-four,  gave  the  world 
his  Gotz  von  Berlichingen,  and  with  it  opened 
a  new  chapter  in  the  history  of  the  German 
drama,  Johann  Wolfgang  Goethe,  who  for 
many  pages  to  come  must  remain  the  central 
figure  of  this  book,  was  a  native  of  Frankfort- 
on-the-Main,  where  he  was  born  on  August  28, 
1749.  In  the  happy,  careless  years  of  youth, 
which  he  has  described  for  us  with  such 
inimitable  charm  in  his  autobiography,  he 
went  through  personally,  one  might  say,  the 
various  stages  in  the  development  of  his 
literature  which  we  have  just  been  considering. 
His  first  university  years  were  spent  in 
Gottsched's  Leipzig,  where  he,  too,  became 
if  not  a  Gottschedian — he  came  too  late  for 


96  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

that — at  least  a  rococo  poet  of  the  approved 
Leipzig  pattern  ;  from  the  rococo  he  passed, 
as  his  literature  had  done,  under  the  influence 
of  Klopstock,  to  Lessing,  and  from  Lessing 
to  that  momentous  time  when  he  first  found 
his  feet  with  Herder's  aid  in  Strassburg. 
Strassburg  was  the  real  birthplace  of  Goethe's 
genius,  as  it  was  the  birthplace  of  the  "  Storm 
.and  Stress." 

Gotz  von  Berlichingen  made  an  incision  into 
the  history  of  the  German  drama  almost  as 
deep  as  Miss  Sara  Sampson  had  done,  eighteen 
years  before  ;  it  became  the  model — in  style 
and  treatment — for  a  vast  dramatic  literature 
which  was  poured  out  without  stint  during 
the  next  ten  years.  Gotz  is  a  prose  play, 
in  which  the  irregularities  of  Shakespeare, 
whom  Voltaire  in  the  name  of  classic  taste  had 
stigmatised  as  a  "  drunken  barbarian,"  are 
accentuated  and  carried  to  extremes.  Goethe 
is  careless  of  form,  careless  of  adaptability 
to  the  stage,  careless  even  of  that  element 
of  the  drama  which  Aristotle,  and  after  him 
Lessing,  had  proclaimed  to  be  of  the  very 
highest  importance,  the  plot.  Gotz  is  a 
character-drama,  the  picture  of  a  great  strong 
man,  a  noble  of  the  sixteenth  century,  who 
repudiates  the  gross  injustices  of  his  class, 


AGE   OF   CLASSIC   ACHIEVEMENT   97 

does  heroic  deeds,  and  dies  heroically.  Gotz 
von  Berlichingen  is,  as  regards  its  subject,  the 
first  of  the  so-called  "  Ritterdramen,"  that 
is  to  say,  dramas  dealing  with  the  decadent 
feudalism  which  marked  the  close  of  the 
Middle  Ages.  But  the  "  Storm  and  Stress  " 
dramatists  also  turned  to  more  modern 
subjects,  being  particularly  attracted  by  the 
type  of  domestic  tragedy  which  Lessing  had 
popularised  ;  Emilia  Galotti,  which  appeared 
the  year  before  Gotz,  was  no  less  a  model  for 
the  movement  than  Gotz.  Here,  too,  Goethe 
fell  in  with  the  tastes  of  his  time  ;  and  in  other 
and  less  important  plays,  such  as  Clavigo  and 
Stella,  he  paid  his  tribute  to  the  "  domestic 
tragedy." 

Apart  from  the  work  of  Goethe  and,  at  a 
later  date,  Schiller,  the  modern  reading 
world  is  little  interested  in  the  dramatic 
literature  of  this  time.  In  point  of  fact,  that 
literature  was  too  much  of  its  time,  too 
preoccupied  with  problems  of  the  moment, 
to  think  of  posterity.  The  whole  activity 
of  the  "  Storm  and  Stress "  is  based  on 
negative,  destructive  premisses,  and  was  more 
intent  on  laughing  the  fogies  of  tradition  to 
scorn  than  in  creating  a  dramatic  literature  of 
intrinsic  worth  to  take  the  place  of  the  dis- 


98  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

credited  alexandrine  tragedies  of  the  pseudo- 
classic  age.  Jakob  Michael  Reinhold  Lenz 
was  a  playwright  of  no  small  gifts,  especially 
in  a  field  which  was  somewhat  neglected  at 
this  time,  namely,  comedy  ;  but  his  life  was 
unbalanced,  and  his  work,  in  spite  of  pene- 
trating flashes  of  geniuses,  shared  in  the 
general  disruption  of  the  age.  Friedrich 
Maximilian  von  Klinger,  who  has  the  doubtful 
distinction  of  having  written  the  play,  Sturm 
und  Drang  (Storm  and  Stress),  which  gave  its 
name  to  the  period,  was  an  even  more  un- 
balanced "  Stormer,"  and  one  in  whose  veins 
the  fever  of  Rousseau  burnt  fiercely.  In  later 
life  he  atoned,  however,  for  his  early  discre- 
tions ;  the  fever  burnt  itself  out,  and,  as 
the  author  of  a  series  of  philosophical  novels, 
Klinger  became  as  staid  and  respectable  a 
member  of  the  German  Parnassus  as  Goethe 
himself  after  he  settled  in  Weimar.  Of 
the  other  writers,  the  most  important  were 
Heinrich  Wilhelm  von  Gerstenberg,  who 
contributed,  even  before  Goethe,  to  the 
dramatic  movement  Ugolino,  a  play  of 
remarkable  imaginative  force,  and  wrote  some 
of  the  most  suggestive  criticism  of  the  time  ; 
Heinrich  Leopold  Wagner,  who  cultivated 
in  a  narrower  sense  the  domestic  tragedy, 


AGE    OF   CLASSIC    ACHIEVEMENT    99 

his  Kindermorderin  (The  Child  Murderess) 
being  a  forerunner — but  a  quite  conscious 
forerunner,  for  Goethe  had  confided  the 
subject  of  his  drama  to  him — of  Goethe's 
Faust ;  and  lastly,  Friedrich  Miiller,  usually 
known  as  the  "  Painter  "  Miiller,  who  formed 
a  not  very  effectual  link  between  "  Storm 
and  Stress "  and  the  nineteenth-century 
Romanticists. 

But  even  if  all  this  activity  lies  far  away 
from  us  to-day,  we  cannot  afford  to  overlook 
it,  for  it  prepared  the  way  for  Germany's 
representative  classical  dramatist,  Schiller. 
In  1781,  the  year  of  Lessing's  death,  eight 
years  after  Gotz  von  Berlichingen,  appeared 
Schiller's  first  drama,  Die  Rduber  (The  Robbers). 
Once  again,  a  clearly  marked  line  was  ruled 
across  the  rapidly  advancing  dramatic  litera- 
ture of  Germany.  For  Schiller  was  what  none 
of  his  predecessors  of  the  "  Storm  and  Stress  " 
had  been,  the  born  dramatist ;  he  had  the  right 
constructive  instinct  for  the  theatre,  a  quality 
which  they  had  been  inclined  to  underrate. 
With  him  the  "  Storm  and  Stress  "  drama 
first  really  became  what  the  Germans  call 
"  buhnenfahig,"  adapted  to  the  stage.  Die 
Rduber  has  all  the  faults  of  an  unbalanced 
juvenility,  but  it  is  an  excellent  stage-play  ; 


100  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

and  it  has  those  mirror-like  qualities  with 
respect  to  the  ideas  of  its  time  which  are 
indispensable  to  all  great  literature.  From 
Die  Rauber  onwards,  the  interests  of  dramatic 
poetry  and  the  national  theatre  become  one. 
This  is  the  real  significance  of  Schiller's  debut. 
Friedrich  Schiller,  born  in  1759,  the  same 
year  as  Robert  Burns,  was  ten  years  younger 
than  Goethe.  Goethe  came  from  the  metro- 
polis of  central  Germany,  Schiller  was  a  South 
German,  a  Swabian.  He  had  passed  his  early 
years  amidst  more  than  his  fair  share  of 
tribulation  and  suffering  ;  and  there  was  not 
a  little  that  was  heroic  in  his  devotion  to  his 
genius.  Die  Rauber  brought  him  fame,  but 
years  had  to  pass  before  his  life  got  into  quieter 
waters,  and  then  it  was  due  to  the  exertions 
of  Goethe  and  the  patronage  of  the  Weimar 
Court.  Die  Rauber  was  followed  by  a  histori- 
cal drama  of  the  Italian  sixteenth  century, 
Fiesco,  and  by  Kabale  und  Liebe  (Love  and 
Intrigue),  a  domestic  tragedy  with  a  dominant 
love-story  ;  but  even  then,  and  in  spite  of  the 
fact  that  these  plays  were  all  valuable  acces- 
sions to  the  national  repertory,  Schiller  felt 
so  little  satisfied  with  his  achievements  and 
prospects  as  a  dramatic  poet,  that  he  turned  to 
journalism,  then  to  history,  and  ultimately 


AGE   OF   CLASSIC   ACHIEVEMENT   101 

to  philosophy.  Meanwhile,  however,  one 
more  play  had  been  added  to  his  list,  Don 
Carlos,  in  which  the  rebel  spirit  of  "  Storm 
and  Stress  "  gradually  began  to  give  place 
to  a  calmer,  more  restful  classicism.  With 
Don  Carlos,  which  was  published  in  1787, 
Schiller,  and  with  him  one  might  say  the 
whole  "  Storm  and  Stress  "  movement,  reached 
a  parting  of  the  ways. 

The  "  Storm  and  Stress  "  found  expression 
in  other  forms  of  literature  besides  the  lyric 
and  the  drama.  Goethe  gave  the  movement 
its  chief  novel,  Werthers  Leiden,  the  year 
after  Gotz  von  Berlichingen.  From  this  book 
one  realises  better  than  before  how  much 
German  literature  owed  to  Rousseau.  It  is 
the  fashion  nowadays  to  look  down  a  little 
on  Goethe's  first  novel  as  bearing  too  strong 
an  imprint  of  the  spirit  of  Rousseau's  Nouvelle 
Helo'ise,  as  belonging  to  an  age  of  effete  and 
maudlin  sentimentality  ;  but  in  many  ways 
it  still  remains  the  most  living  and  interesting 
product  of  the  German  "  Storm  and  Stress." 
To  appreciate  it  at  its  true  worth,  we  must 
endeavour  to  detach  ourselves  from  its  ethic 
aspects,  and  look  at  it  objectively  as  a  piece 
of  literary  art.  How  far  has  Goethe  succeeded 
in  reproducing  the  spirit  and  mood  of  the 


102  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

world  in  which  his  Werther  lived  and  moved  ? 
Has  he  given  it  a  semblance  of  reality, 
or  is  his  hero  Werther  merely  a  puppet  mouth- 
ing ideas  and  doing  actions  that  stand  in  no 
logical  connection  with  the  character  of  the 
man  as  Goethe  describes  him?  The  answer 
to  all  such  questions  must  necessarily  be  to 
Goethe's  credit.  We  may  not  be  disposed  to 
weep  over  Werther' s  suicide,  but  we  must 
admit  the  convincing  power  with  which 
Goethe  has  told  his  tragic  story.  Of  all 
the  heroes  of  German  drama  and  romance  in 
the  eighteenth  century  Werther  alone  had 
sufficient  vitality  to  impose  himself  on  the 
imagination  of  the  world  at  large.  We  no 
longer  look  either  at  Homer  or  at  Ossian 
with  Werther's  eyes,  but  we  appreciate  the 
delicate  art  with  which  Goethe  has  reflected 
the  changing  moods  of  his  unhappy  hero  in  the 
poetry  of  these,  for  the  eighteenth  century,  so 
significant  poets.  Werther  is  one  of  the  very 
few  books  of  the  eighteenth  century  which, 
with  our  own  Tom  Jones  and  Clarissa,  have 
in  them  elements  that  have  successfully 
defied  the  passing  of  time. 

Unfortunately,  however,  this  novel  had  no 
worthy  successors ;  it  belonged  to  that  by 
no  means  rare  type  of  masterpiece  which 


AGE   OF   CLASSIC   ACHIEVEMENT   103 

flashes  across  the  literary  firmament,  evokes 
enormous  enthusiasm,  but  proves  ultimately 
barren  for  the  subsequent  literary  evolution. 
We  saw  something  of  the  same  kind  in  the 
case  of  Lessing's  Minna  von  Barnhelm.  While 
very  inferior  works  in  European  literatures — 
Lillo's  Merchant  of  London,  which  has  already 
been  mentioned  in  these  pages,  is  a  striking 
example — have  turned  the  whole  current 
of  literary  development  and  put  their 
stamp  on  a  century  of  literary  production, 
others  of  far  greater  power  and  significance 
have  had  no  effective  following.  In  point 
of  fact,  Werther  did  not  really  stand  in  the 
main  line  of  development  of  German  fiction 
at  all ;  it  represented  a  side  issue,  the  novel 
in  general  remaining  faithful  to  the  original 
lines  laid  down  by  works  like  Wieland's 
Agaihon.  The  vast  literature  called  forth 
by  Werther,  both  in  Germany  and  in  other 
lands,  is,  for  the  most  part,  worthless ;  it 
degenerated  rapidly  into  reprehensible  extra- 
vagance ;  and  ruins  and  moonlight,  senti- 
mental tears  and  harrowing  suicides  became 
its  staple  ingredients.  Thus  ridicule  and 
disgrace  fell  on  the  entire  movement  which 
Goethe's  novel  had  inaugurated. 

Looking  through  the  novels  of  the  "  Storm 


104  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

and  Stress,"  the  modern  reader  will  find  a  cer- 
tain pleasure  in  Anton  Reiser,  an  unvarnished, 
autobiographical  story  by  Karl  Philipp  Moritz, 
a  refreshing  transcript  of  reality  in  this  age 
of  sentimentality  ;  interesting,  too,  are  the 
novels  of  Johann  Jakob  Heinse,  especially 
his  famous  Ardinghello,  oder  die  gluck- 
seligen  Inseln  (Ardinghello,  or  The  Blessed 
Isles),  the  Latin  atmosphere  of  which 
introduced  a  certain  self-consciousness  and 
self-criticism  into  the  childishly  naive  out- 
pourings of  the  Teutonic  mind.  The  real 
antidote  to  Werther,  and  for  that  part  to 
Werther's  source,  Rousseau,  was  our  English 
Sterne,  one  of  the  very  greatest  forces  on  the 
German  literature  of  this  epoch.  Sterne,  in 
fact,  was  the  saving  of  the  "  Storm  and  Stress  " 
novel ;  and  towards  the  close  of  the  period 
there  arose  in  Germany  a  writer  who,  under 
the  spell  of  Tristram  Shandy,  turned  the 
crudities  of  the  sentimentalists  into  a  new 
channel,  and  created  a  novel  which,  without 
winning  a  permanent  place  in  the  nation's 
esteem,  appealed  irresistibly  to  the  generation 
for  which  it  was  written — Jean  Paul  Fried- 
rich  Richter.  No  German  writer  was  ever  loved 
by  his  generation,  and,  for  that  part,  by  the 
succeeding  generation  as  well,  as  "  Jean  Paul " ; 


AGE   OF   CLASSIC   ACHIEVEMENT   105 

his  humour  mingled  with  tears,  his  kindly 
pictures  of  the  provincial  life  of  his  Franconian 
home,  his  grotesque  and  far-fetched  similes  and 
imaginings,  above  all,  that  soaring  poetic  fan- 
tasy, for  which  the  universe  was  hardly  wide 
enough,  which  brought  the  extremes  of  the 
infinitely  great  and  the  infinitely  little  into 
close  touch  with  each  other,  were  exactly  to 
the  taste  of  his  time.  And  yet  nowadays  it 
can  hardly  be  said  that  Richter  is  more  than 
tolerated  by  German  readers.  We  live  in  an 
age  of  sterner  sesthetic  ideals,  when  the 
offences  against  form  and  proportion  and  even 
good  taste  in  which  Richter  revels,  are  no 
longer  judged  indulgently  ;  when  his  laboured 
humour  has  gone  as  much  out  of  fashion  as 
the  sentimental  humour  of  Sterne ;  when  a  new 
realism  has  placed  truth  higher  than  mere 
imagining.  All  these  things  have  militated 
against  Richter' s  popularity ;  but  he  forms 
none  the  less  the  apex  of  the  "  Storm  and 
Stress"  novel  and  its  logical  conclusion;  with 
him  it  recovered  from  the  overweening  senti- 
mentalism  of  Rousseau.  One  other  form  of  fic- 
tion deserves  passing  mention  before  we  leave 
this  period,  and  that  is  the  philosophical  novel. 
In  the  "  Storm  and  Stress  "  itself  this  had 
been  represented  by  Friedrich  Jacobi,  the 


106  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

author  of  Eduard  Allwill  and  Woldemar,  rather 
colourless,  incorporeal  books,  but  books  of 
ideas ;  and,  at  a  later  stage,  the  "  Storm 
and  Stress "  dramatist  Klinger  produced, 
as  we  have  seen,  a  series  of  works  in  which 
the  more  restful  thought  of  the  time  takes 
the  place  of  the  fever  and  the  fret  of  his 
early  plays. 

In  the  movement  of  literature,  the  "  Storm 
and  Stress  "  passed  gradually  like  a  dissolving- 
view  into  the  maturer  epoch  which  we  associ- 
ated with  the  climax  of  the  German  classical 
period.  It  is  difficult  to  say  when  the 
"  Storm  and  Stress  "  ceased  and  the  strictly 
classical  period  began  ;  in  reality,  the  earlier 
movement  never  ceased  at  all ;  it  merely 
found  its  way  into  lower  literary  channels  ; 
and  all  through  the  last  decades  of  the 
eighteenth  century  it  continued  to  provide 
the  German  public  with  their  favourite  pabu- 
lum in  the  form  of  endless  sentimental  novels, 
books  which  the  literary  histories  do  not 
deign  to  touch.  It  also  supplied  the  German 
stage  with  its  daily  bread  in  the  shape  of 
a  vast  literature  of  tragedies  of  common 
life,  "  family  pictures  "  as  they  were  called, 
always  lachrymose,  but  not  infrequently, 
as  in  the  best  work  of  the  actor  August 


AGE   OF   CLASSIC   ACHIEVEMENT   107 

Wilhelm  Iffland,  containing  true  reproductions 
of  the  social  conditions.  The  legitimate  end 
of  this  dramatic  development  was  the  drama 
of  August  von  Kotzebue,  which  flooded 
the  German  and  even  the  European  stage 
at  the  turn  of  the  century.  The  tragedy 
of  domestic  incident  had  been,  so  to  speak, 
put  out  of  court  by  the  higher  sweep  which 
the  drama  took  in  Weimar.  The  tragedy  of 
common  life,  even  before  its  degeneration 
set  in,  had  been  declared  outside  the 
literary  pale,  and  in  Kotzebue  this  "  unlit- 
erary "  drama  returned  and  avenged  itself 
by  taking  possession  of  the  stage.  Kotzebue 
was  a  gifted  dramatic,  or  at  least  theatrical, 
writer  who  had  gone  astray  owing  to  the 
lack  of  those  responsibilities  which  the  higher 
poetry  places  upon  her  priesthood.  He  was 
an  outcast  from  the  first,  and,  like  all  out- 
casts, did  not  feel  called  upon  to  minister  to 
ideal  aims. 

But  it  is  time  to  turn  to  the  great  literature 
of  the  closing  decades  of  the  eighteenth 
century.  The  "  Storm  and  Stress "  may 
have  never  really  ceased  until,  at  the  very 
close  of  the  century,  it  underwent  a  resuscita- 
tion in  the  form  of  a  new  movement,  to  be 
known  thereafter  as  Romanticism,  but  the 


108  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

outstanding  works  of  this  period  clearly  mark 
the  beginning  of  a  return  to  the  simpler  and 
chaster  ideals  of  classic  poetry.  Whatever 
may  be  said  of  the  general  literary  movement 
and  the  development  of  literary  taste,  we  can 
at  least  put  our  finger  on  the  exact  point 
at  which  the  two  leading  poets,  Goethe 
and  Schiller,  renounced  the  literary  creed 
of  their  youth  and  embraced  a  serener 
literary  faith.  The  transition  is  seen  in  two 
dramas,  Goethe's  Egmont  and  Schiller's  Don 
Carlos. 

The  beginnings  of  both  these  works  lay  far 
back  in  the  preceding  period.  Egmont  had 
been  planned  while  Goethe  was  still  heart  and 
soul  with  the  old  movement ;  it  is,  in  great 
measure,  a  drama  of  "  Storm  and  Stress," 
written  in  the  irregular  form  of  that  school. 
But  a  mellowness,  a  more  conciliatory  spirit, 
has  come  over  the  play ;  the  dark  figure  of 
Alba  is  balanced  by  the  serener  atmosphere 
that  surrounds  Egmont  himself  and  the 
incomparable  Klarchen ;  and  Egmont  goes 
out  to  his  execution  at  the  close  inspired  by  a 
vision  of  the  goddess  of  Freedom,  faces  death 
filled  with  a  heroic  optimism.  This  is  a  very 
different  thing  from  the  death  of  that  other 
hero,  Werther,  whose  coffin  was  carried 


AGE    OF   CLASSIC    ACHIEVEMENT   109 

by  workmen  and  round  whose  death  religion 
wove  no  hope. 

Schiller's  first  tragedy  in  verse  marks 
even  more  clearly  the  transition  ;  for  here 
Schiller  unmistakably  breaks  with  his  whole 
past.  Don  Carlos  had,  as  we  have  seen, 
been  begun  back  in  Schiller's  "  Storm  and 
Stress  "  days,  but  it  had  undergone  several 
transformations.  Under  the  influence  of  the 
higher  French  drama  of  the  eighteenth 
century,  and  the  taste  for  that  drama 
which  was  encouraged  by  the  theatre 
in  Mannheim,  Schiller  carefully  removed  all 
the  too-realistic  elements  of  his  original 
treatment  of  the  theme  ;  he  determined  that 
Don  Carlos  should  not  appear  to  be  merely  a 
successor  to  Kabale  und  Liebe.  He  idealised 
his  characters  in  the  approved  French  style  ; 
and  raised  the  whole  play  to  a  higher  poetic 
level ;  moreover,  he  chose  as  his  medium  of 
expression  that  blank  verse  which  Lessing  in 
his  Nathan  had  successfully  transferred  from 
the  English  to  the  German  stage.  The  main 
drawback  to  the  work  is  that,  in  consequence 
of  the  frequent  transformations  which  it 
underwent,  it  has  lost  something  of  its  original 
clearness  and  consistency  ;  the  plot  became 
hopelessly  involved,  and  what  had  been 


110  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

originally  a  purely  human  conflict  at  a 
royal  court,  became  a  drama  of  political 
ideas,  a  plea  for  the  humane  ideals  of  the 
eighteenth-century  "  Weltbiirger  "  or  cosmo- 
politan. 

Whether  Schiller  felt  that  he  had  not  quite 
succeeded  with  Don  Carlos — and  as  a  matter 
of  fact,  there  were  difficulties  of  getting  the 
drama  performed;  he  even  thought  he 
might  have  to  rewrite  it  in  prose  as 
German  actors  had  apparently  lost  the  art  of 
speaking  verse ! — in  any  case,  after  Don 
Carlos  the  poet  turned  his  back  on  the  theatre 
for  many  years,  left  it  time,  so  to  speak,  to 
make  up  on  him.  Meanwhile  he  threw  himself 
into  the  study  of  the  historical  period  in 
which  he  had  been  obliged  to  immerse  himself 
as  a  preparation  for  Don  Carlos,  and  made 
a  beginning  to  an  ambitiously  planned 
history  of  the  Revolt  of  the  Netherlands. 
This  was  followed,  somewhat  later,  by  a, 
picturesque,  if,  as  history,  less  satisfying, 
study  of  the  Thirty  Years'  War.  In  these 
years  Schiller,  as  far  as  literature  was  con- 
cerned, was  little  more  than  an  onlooker; 
he  edited  a  literary  review,  Thalia,  and  his 
actual  contributions  were  limited  to  a  couple 
of  short  novels,  and  a  few  poems,  in  which  he 


AGE   OF   CLASSIC   ACHIEVEMENT   111 

was  clearly  feeling  his  way  to  a  new  form  of 
lyric  expression,  the  philosophical  lyric. 
Poems  like  Die  Kunstler  (The  Artists)  and 
Der  Spaziergang  (The  Walk),  Die  Goiter  Grie- 
chenlands  (The  Gods  of  Greece),  belong  to  the 
most  characteristic  and  precious  creations  of 
Schiller's  genius.  Gradually,  however,  another 
and  peculiarly  congenial  interest  took  the 
place  of  history.  Thanks  to  Goethe's  influ- 
ence, he  had  been  appointed  to  a  vacant  chair 
in  the  University  of  Jena,  and  threw  himself 
zealously  into  abstract  studies  ;  he  fell  under 
the  spell  of  the  philosophy  of  Kant,  and 
devoted  himself  especially  to  the  study  of  that 
thinker's  aesthetics.  But  before  turning  to 
Kant,  to  Schiller's  aesthetic  writings,  and  to 
his  friendship  with  Goethe,  it  may  be  well 
to  look  for  a  moment  to  the  steps  whereby 
Goethe  rose  from  "  Storm  and  Stress  "  to 
classicism. 

Goethe,  having  outstripped  the  contempor- 
ary movement,  also  turned  away  from  pure 
literature,  and  abided  his  time.  The  intense 
imaginative  activity  of  his  "  Storm  and 
Stress  "  days  died  down  entirely  when,  in 
1775,  he  settled  in  Weimar  at  the  invitation 
of  the  young  Duke.  He  gave  himself  up 
unreservedly  to  the  political  interests  and 


112  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

the  social  pleasures  of  his  new  surroundings  j. 
and  for  intellectual  solace  he  turned  rather  to 
science  than  to  poetry.  He  had  been  rudely 
uprooted  from  his  early  milieu  ;  he  could  no 
longer,  now  that  he  had  been  transferred  to 
a  higher  social  circle,  remain  the  crude  rebel 
of  Gotz  von  Berlichingen  and  Werther  ;  and 
he  chose  to  be  silent.  The  literary  work  of 
his  first  ten  years  in  Weimar,  which  includes 
a  few  matchless  lyrics  inspired  by  his  love 
for  Frau  Charlotte  von  Stein,  and  a  few 
unimportant  plays,  might  all  be  included  in 
one  slim  volume.  Thus,  as  far  as  published 
work  was  concerned,  these  years,  in  which, 
in  the  world  outside,  the  seething  ferment 
of  "  Storm  and  Stress  "  was  gradually  dying 
down,  are  all  but  a  blank  in  Goethe's  activity. 
But  greater  works  were  in  preparation  ;  and 
these  were  brought  to  final  completion  by 
Goethe's  visit  to  Italy  in  1786-87.  Italy 
meant  many  things  to  Goethe,  but,  above 
all,  it  gave  him  the  opportuuity  of  coming 
to  a  reckoning  with  himself,  of  drawing  the 
results  of  an  epoch  in  his  life  to  a  conclusion, 
of  ending  one  chapter  and  making  preparations 
for  a  new  one.  In  Italy  he  collected  and 
revised  his  writings  for  a  new  edition  which 
was  to  include  the  three  great  dramas  of  his 


AGE    OF   CLASSIC   ACHIEVEMENT   113 

middle  period,  Egmont,  Iphigenie  auf  Tauris 
in  its  final  form,  and  his  Italian  drama  of 
introspection,  Torquato  Tasso. 

The  first  of  these  dramas,  which  partakes 
to  so  great  an  extent  of  the  poet's  earlier 
period,  has  already  been  discussed  in  these 
pages.  The  other  two,  Iphigenie  and  Tasso, 
belong  to  the  most  vital  creations  of  the  classic 
age  in  Germany,  and  alike  illustrate  that 
higher,  more  chastened  classicism,  which,  after 
the  "  Storm  and  Stress,"  took  the  place  of 
the  artificial  pseudo-classicism  in  which  Goethe 
made  his  literary  debut.  Iphigenie  in  Tauris 
is  the  noblest  restoration  of  the  antique  drama 
which  the  eighteenth  century  has  to  show, 
and  a  splendid  illustration  of  the  blending  of 
the  new  humanity,  born  of  Renaissance  and 
Enlightenment,  with  the  oldest  humanity  of 
all,  that  of  the  Greeks.  In  the  calm  majesty 
and  noble  beauty  of  its  verse,  Goethe's  play 
is,  one  might  say,  more  classic,  in  the  current 
acceptance  of  that  word,  than  the  original 
play  of  Euripides  ;  for  the  latter,  with  his 
nervous,  relentless  realism,  has  little  of  the 
repose  that  Winkelmann,  and  with  him  his 
whole  century,  attributed  to  the  antique. 
Here  in  Goethe  is  the  true  Hellenism  as  Hel- 
lenism appeared  to  his  age,  the  humanising 


114,  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

power  of  ancient  culture.  Here  the  German 
spirit  has  set  out  on  its  argosy, 

"  Daa  Land  der  Griechen  mit  der  Seele  suchend  '* 

("  seeking  the  land  of  the  Greeks  with  its 
soul");  and  if  it  did  not  find  the  real 
Greece,  it  found  at  least  the  Greece  that 
revolutionised  the  culture  of  the  eighteenth 
century. 

Torquato  Tasso,  the  other  great  drama  of 
this  eventful  epoch  in  the  evolution  of  German 
poetry,  is  no  Greek  drama  in  so  far  as  it  deals 
with  the  story  of  an  unhappy  modern  poet ; 
its  theme  is  a  very  modern  conflict,  which 
Goethe  had  himself  to  fight  out  in  all  its 
bitterness,  the  conflict  of  a  sensitive  soul  with 
a  hard,  self-seeking  world  ;  but  Tasso,  too,  is, 
in  its  ultimate  essence,  classic.  Goethe  is 
still  under  the  influence  of  the  lessons  of  form 
and  beauty  which  he  had  learned  from  Greece 
in  his  Iphigenie;  Tasso  is  classic  because  it, 
too,  is  humane. 

With  Goethe's  stay  in  Italy,  and  with  these 
two  great  dramas,  the  last  and  highest  stage 
of  German  classical  poetry,  the  foundations 
of  which  had  been  laid  by  Lessing,  Wieland 
and  Herder,  opens.  And  it  is  meetly  sym- 
bolised for  us  in  the  friendship  between 


AGE   OF   CLASSIC   ACHIEVEMENT   115 

Goethe  and  Schiller,  which  lasted  from  1794 
until  Schiller's  death  in  1805. 

Every  age  of  German  poetry  is  associated, 
in  a  higher  degree  than  is  the  case  in  other 
literatures,  with  a  philosophical  background. 
In  the  earlier  classical  epoch  that  background 
had  been  the  cosmopolitan  rationalism  inau- 
gurated in  Germany  by  Leibniz,  Thomasius 
and  Wolff ;  now  it  was  the  philosophy  of 
Immanuel  Kant,  Germany's  greatest  philoso- 
phic spirit,  perhaps  the  greatest  philosopher  in 
the  whole  range  of  human  history.  Kant 
stands  in  a  similar  relation  to  the  abstract 
thinking  of  his  century,  to  that  in  which 
Goethe  stands  to  its  poetic  development. 
He  represents  the  apex  of  the  movement  of 
Rationalism  or  Enlightenment.  Just  as 
Goethe  stood  for  the  logical  development  of 
German  classicism  from  a  false  classicism  to  a 
true  and  humane  one,  and  thereby  rendered 
the  older  classicism  effete,  so  Kant  was  a  great 
positive  force,  nullifying  the  crude  utilitarian- 
ism of  the  earlier  rationalistic  movement. 
Goethe  extracted  from  the  sordid  spirit  of  the 
earlier  literature  a  poetic  idealism  of  the 
highest  type ;  Kant  superseded  the  materialism 
of  the  eighteenth-century  deists  by  a  new 
spiritual  idealism.  Kant  was  a  great  liberator, 


116  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

a  greater  even  than  Descartes.  Alike  in  meta- 
physics, ethics  and  aesthetics,  he  emancipated 
the  human  mind,  gave  it  wings  wherewith 
to  soar.  By  freeing  speculation  from  the 
subjective  bonds  of  time  and  place,  he  opened 
up  limitless  worlds  to  the  imagination;  by 
placing  human  morals  above  all  taint  of  self- 
seeking,  by  making  them  independent  of  the 
bonds  of  self,  he  set  man  morally  free  ;  and 
from  this  new  metaphysics  and  new  ethics 
he  deduced  an  aesthetic  system,  which  gave 
poetry  an  enormous  impetus.  On  Kant's 
shoulders  rose  Schiller.  From  Kant's  system, 
which  naturally  kept  strictly  within  the 
sphere  of  the  philosophic  text-book,  Schiller 
deduced  the  practical  philosophy  of  the  classic 
age,  and  he  gave  expression  to  it  in  his 
magnificent  Briefe  uber  die  dsthetische 
Erziehung  des  Menschen  (Letters  on  the 
^Esthetic  Education  of  Man),  and  the  treatise 
Vber  naive  und  sentimentalische  Dichtung 
(On  Naive  and  Sentimental  Poetry).  Here 
the  great  doctrine,  which  underlay  the  classic 
strivings  and  ideals  of  Weimar,  is  first 
clearly  stated  :  the  education  and  liberation 
of  the  human  spirit  by  means  of  art.  For  the 
first  time  in  the  modern  world,  the  peculiar 
function  of  the  beautiful  as  an  educative  force 


AGE   OF   CLASSIC   ACHIEVEMENT   117 

in  human  life  was  realised.  That  is  the 
deepest  lesson  German  classic  literature  had 
to  give  to  the  world. 

In  the  works  produced  by  Goethe  and 
Schiller  in  the  period  of  their  united  activity 
are  enshrined  these  great,  world-moving  ideas. 
To  take  Goethe  first.  In  the  beginning  of 
this  epoch  he  published  his  chief  novel, 
Wilhelm  Meisters  Lehrjahre  (Wilhelm  Meister's 
Apprenticeship),  which  has  been  well  described 
as  an  "  Odyssey  of  Culture."  Here  we  have  a 
book  which  occupies  a  central  position,  to 
which  no  other  work  of  the  age,  except  perhaps 
Faust,  can  pretend.  When  the  novel  appeared, 
it  became  clear  that  the  long  and  often 
confused  evolution  of  German  fiction  in  the 
eighteenth  century,  with  its  imitations  of 
Richardson  and  Sterne  and  Rousseau,  its 
extravagance  and  its  truth,  its  sentimentality 
and  its  rationalism,  was,  as  it  were,  dimly 
making  towards  this  culmination.  Goethe's 
Meister  is  not  merely  a  novel  of  the  classic 
age,  but  pre-eminently  the  novel  of  German 
classicism.  It  is  a  summation  of  that  wisdom 
which  Goethe  had  slowly  accumulated  on  the 
new  gospel  of  art  and  on  the  relation  of  the 
individual  to  his  fellow-men.  It,  too,  retains 
the  traditional  subjective  and  biographic  form 


118  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

of  the  Qerman  epic — the  form  of  Parzival, 
of  Simplicissimus,  of  Agathon  ;  for  it  is  the 
history  of  a  soul  on  its  journey  through  life, 
the  "  sentimental  education  "  of  a  young  man 
who  goes  out  into  life  seeking  a  vocation 
which  he  has  difficulty  in  discovering.  "  Cast 
forward  the  eye  of  the  spirit,  awake  in  your 
souls  the  imaginative  power  which  carries 
forth  what  is  fairest,  what  is  highest,  life, 
away  beyond  the  stars."  "  Travel,  travel 
back  into  life,  take  along  with  you  this  holy 
earnestness,  for  earnestness  alone  makes  life 
eternity."  Such  is  the  highest  wisdom  which 
Wilhelm  acquires  in  the  course  of  his  appren- 
ticeship. 

Schiller  faces  problems  of  no  less  magnitude 
in  the  series  of  his  great  dramas  which  opened 
in  1799  with  the  trilogy  of  Wallenstein.  Here 
the  Kantian  antinomies  of  pleasure  and  duty, 
which  in  their  crasser  forms  had  provided 
the  domestic  tragedy  with  endless  "  prob- 
lems," are  dealt  with  on  the  higher  plane  of 
idealistic  poetry.  Wallenstein  is  a  "  fate 
tragedy  "  in  which  the  hero  is  tormented,  not 
by  effete,  old  wives'  tales  of  Delphic  oracles, 
but  by  that  inner  struggle  of  the  soul  which 
constitutes  modern  tragedy ;  a  struggle 
outwardly  symbolised  here  in  the  hero's  faith 


AGE   OF   CLASSIC   ACHIEVEMENT   119 

in  the  guiding  influence  of  the  stars.  Wallen- 
stein  is  a  classic  hero,  who  over-reaches  him- 
self, who  takes  the  fatal  step  that  ultimately 
leads  him  to  a  tragic  fall ;  but  in  the  course 
of  that  fall  his  soul  is  stripped  of  its  conven- 
tions, and  he  stands  out,  at  the  last,  purified 
and  ennobled,  a  hero  who  compels  our 
pity  and  fear.  Apart  from  this,  Wallenstein 
unrolls  before  us  a  rich  tapestry  of  the  most 
picturesque  age  of  German  history,  the  Thirty 
Years'  War;  and  bears  witness  to  Schiller's 
skill,  which  had  been  acquired  by  his  long 
study  of  history,  in  clothing  the  skeleton 
of  Kantian  ethics  and  Greek  dramatic  theory 
with  a  living  body.  After  Wallenstein  came, 
in  the  last  years  of  Schiller's  feverish  activity 
and  stupendous  productive  power,  Maria 
Stuart,  in  which,  however  much  we  may  de- 
precate his  rather  superficial  treatment  of  our 
national  history,  the  favourite  tragic  conflict 
of  Germany's  classic  age  stands  out  distinctly  : 
Schiller's  heroine  passes  through  the  fire  of 
self-abasement  to  find  her  higher  and  noble 
self.  Maria  Stuart  is  a  great  soul  imprisoned, 
tempted,  trampled  upon ;  she  emerges  in 
the  end  chastened  and  purified,  and  walks 
to  the  scaffold,  as  Egmont  had  done,  in  the 
conviction  of  a  great  spiritual  victory  accom- 


120  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

plished,  atoning  for  her  sin  by  a  heroic 
end.  We  find  the  same  problem  again  in 
Die  Jungfrau  von  Orleans  (The  Maid  of 
Orleans),  the  third  drama  of  this  final  period 
of  Schiller's  career.  The  ethical  background 
of  this  play  is  not  very  different  from  that 
of  Maria  Stuart ;  the  heroine  sins  and 
suffers,  rises  through  renunciation  to  higher 
things,  and  dies  amidst  the  spiritual  trans- 
figuration of  her  mediaeval  faith  ;  but  how 
very  skilfully  Schiller  has  adapted  his  tech- 
nique to  this  new  theme  !  Maria  Stuart  is, 
for  the  most  part,  painted  in  the  rather  drab 
colours  that  suggest  the  tragedy  of  common 
life  ;  it  deals  with  passions  that  are  at  times 
the  reverse  of  heroic,  and  it  brings  the  two 
queens,  Mary  and  Elizabeth,  into  a  situation 
that  leaves  an  unpleasant  memory  with  us. 
The  Maid  of  Orleans,  on  the  other  hand,  is 
unfolded  amidst  an  extravagant  display  of 
mediaeval  colour  and  brilliancy;  the  ethical 
problem,  the  rising  on  one's  dead  self  to  higher 
things,  is  similar,  but  how  different  is  the 
framework  !  Ever  eager  to  win  new  domains 
for  his  art,  Schiller  did  not  rest  here  ;  his 
next  work  belonged  to  a  totally  different 
category.  Die  Braut  von  Messina  (The  Bride 
of  Messina)  is  an  attempt  to  reproduce  a 


AGE   OF   CLASSIC   ACHIEVEMENT   121 

Greek  tragedy  in  a  mediaeval  setting.  The 
outward  semblance  of  ancient  tragedy  is 
preserved,  the  acts  being  only  marked  by  the 
introduction  of  a  chorus,  while  the  simplicity 
of  the  characters  and  the  fate-swayed  theme 
clearly  point  to  the  Greek  model.  Schiller 
could  not  go  so  far  as  to  introduce  an  oracle 
into  his  Sicilian  story  ;  but  he  put  a  super- 
stitious faith  in  dreams  in  its  place,  not 
altogether  realising  that  a  mere  superstition 
lacked  the  dignity  of  religious  conviction 
which  the  oracle  possessed  for  the  ancients. 
Within  this  framework,  however,  Schiller  has 
given  us  a  powerful  dramatic  poem,  and  one 
that  contains  some  of  his  finest  poetry ;  but 
the  stiffening  formalism  of  a  classic  method 
has  laid  its  cold  hand  on  his  figures,  who 
have  become  more  statuesquely  simple,  but 
less  human  and  living.  No  doubt,  The  Bride 
of  Messina  was  something  of  an  aberration  ; 
Schiller  soon  felt  that  it  was  so  ;  and  his  next 
work,  and  the  last  he  was  to  complete,  Wilhelm 
Tell,  is  a  return  to  a  broad,  national  basis. 
Tell  is  the  national  tragedy,  or  rather  drama, 
of  German  Switzerland  ;  it  brings  the  entire 
spirit  of  the  Swiss  nation  on  to  the  stage, 
depicts  it  in  the  throes  of  a  life  and  death 
struggle  for  autonomy.  Tell  himself  is  less 


122  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

the  hero  of  the  old  saga,  the  master-archer, 
who  by  his  skill  with  his  crossbow  avenges 
himself  on  the  tyrant  and  rescues  his  people 
from  bondage  to  the  House  of  Austria,  than  an 
abstract  personification  of  the  heroic  side  of 
the  Swiss  national  character,  as  Schiller 
conceived  it.  And  the  action  in  which  this 
hero  becomes  involved  in  the  course  of  the 
drama,  is  planned  with  a  view  to  these  wider 
national  issues,  rather  than  to  the  purely 
personal  conflict.  This  gives  the  drama  a 
panoramic,  epic  quality  which,  no  doubt, 
weakens  its  immediate  personal  appeal ;  but 
the  German  dramatist  at  all  times  has  regarded 
it  as  his  chief  glory  to  fight  against  the 
laming  restrictions  of  theory;  and  who  shall 
say  that  Schiller  was  not  as  justified  here  in 
widening  the  purview  of  the  drama,  as  Goethe 
had  been  with  his  Tasso,  or,  for  that  part,  Less- 
ing  with  his  Miss  Sara  Sampson?  Schiller's  last 
work  was  to  have  dealt  with  the  story  of  the 
Polish  pretender  Demetrius.  Again  we  find 
him,  in  the  fragment  of  the  tragedy  that  has 
been  preserved,  striving  to  attain  a  more 
closely  knit  action,  a  more  intimate  fusion 
of  the  fate  of  the  hero  with  his  character  ; 
and  there  is  little  doubt  but  that  the  poet 
would  have  advanced  with  this  tragedy 


AGE   OF   CLASSIC   ACHIEVEMENT    123 

another  step  towards  that  ideal  of  a  national 
drama  which,  in  a  dim,  unconscious  way, 
the  entire  classical  and  romantic  epoch  of 
German  writers  regarded  as  its  ultimate  aim. 
With  Schiller's  death  in  1805,  the  develop- 
ment of  the  German  drama,  on  the  widely 
human  lines  laid  down  by  the  eighteenth 
century,  came  to  an  abrupt  close  ;  for  there 
was  no  one  left  to  whom  the  torch  of  classicism 
could  be  handed  on.  The  one  great  German 
dramatist  who  was  writing  in  1805,  Heinrich 
von  Kleist,  had  broken  completely  with  the 
eighteenth-century  spirit,  and  had  espoused 
a  more  intimately  personal  Romanticism. 

While  in  the  works  we  have  just  been  dis- 
cussing the  essentially  humane  aspects  of  Wei- 
mar classicism  have  been  emphasised,  there 
was  another,  and  in  some  respect  less  pleasing 
side  to  the  classical  movement,  its  artificial 
formalism.  Some  of  the  most  interesting  pages 
of  the  correspondence  between  Schiller  and 
Goethe  are  devoted  to  a  painstaking  dis- 
cussion of  the  formal  aspects  of  literature, 
and  that,  moreover,  with  a  very  clearly 
marked  tendency  to  superimpose  on  German 
literature  the  classic  models.  The  spheres  of 
drama  and  epic  are  deliminated ;  various 
technical  matters,  such  as  the  "  retarding 


124  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

moment  "  in  a  work  of  art,  are  discussed  with 
a  dangerous  tendency  to  mere  barren  theoris- 
ing ;  above  all,  the  advisability  of  stripping 
the  creations  of  the  imagination  of  all  personal 
and  subjective  elements  is  considered,  of 
preserving  the  sanctity  of  type,  a  principle 
which  the  Renaissance  critics  believed  they 
had  discovered  in  the  works  of  Greek  antiquity. 
All  these  matters  were  clearly  in  antagonism 
to  the  spirit  of  Germanic  freedom  which  had 
given  German  literature  its  enormous  impetus 
in  the  eighteenth  century,  and  on  which  the 
"  Storm  and  Stress  "  had  risen  to  greatness  ; 
and  German  poetry  suffered  under  the  check 
to  its  spontaneity.  We  have  already  dis- 
cussed the  exaggerated  classicism  of  Schiller's 
Bride  of  Messina,  and  if  Tell  is  a  less  indi- 
vidualised hero  than  Wallenstein,  it  is  to  be 
put  down  to  an  undue  sacrifice  to  theory. 
But  the  effect  of  this  classic  formalism  on 
Goethe  was  even  more  marked  than  on 
Schiller. 

Wallenstein  was  the  first  result  of  the 
influence  which  the  friendship  and  intercourse 
with  Goethe  had  on  Schiller's  genius  ;  Hermann 
und  Dorothea  might  be  described  as  a  proof 
of  the  beneficent  influence  of  Schiller's 
encouragement  on  Goethe's  genius.  No  poem 


AGE   OF   CLASSIC   ACHIEVEMENT   125 

of  the  classical  period  better  illustrates  the 
dark  as  well  as  the  light  side  of  German 
classical  achievement ;  for  Hermann  und 
Dorothea  may  be  reasonably  claimed  to  be 
Germany's  greatest  purely  classical  poem. 
The  classicism  here  manifests  itself  in  the  all- 
pervading  influence  of  Homer,  that  poet 
being  to  Goethe's  epic  idyll  what  Sophocles 
was  to  Schiller's  classic  tragedy.  Goethe  had 
no  compunction  in  declaring  that  his  intention 
here  was  to  transfer  the  primitive  nawete  of 
the  Iliad  and  the  Odyssey  to  a  sentimental 
story  of  trivial  dimensions.  The  way  was 
pointed  out  to  him  by  his  predecessor,  Johann 
Heinrich  Voss,  who,  after  steeping  himself 
in  the  poetry  of  the  Odyssey,  had  in  his 
idylls  adapted  the  manner  of  that  epic — or 
what  at  least  appeared  to  him  as  such — to 
even  more  trivial  and  provincial  themes  than 
that  of  Hermann.  Goethe  was  too  clear- 
headed a  critic  not  to  realise  this  grotesque 
disparity,  and  he  endeavoured  to  get  over  it 
by  those  generalising  methods  he  had  distilled 
from  the  classic  theorists.  Here  lies  the 
fundamental  difference  between  the  realism  of 
Voss's  Luise,  and  the  classicism  of  Hermann 
und  Dorothea.  Goethe  aimed  at  giving  his  hero, 
Hermann,  a  kind  of  universal  significance,  at 


126  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

making  him,  so  to  speak,  an  Ajax  or  Odysseus 
of  his  nation,  a  type  of  German  manhood  ; 
Dorothea,  too,  generalised  into  an  ideal 
of  noble  eighteenth-century  womanhood,  is 
lifted  above  the  petty  surroundings  of  her 
life  and  fate ;  and,  most  skilful  stroke  of  all, 
Goethe  has  utilised,  as  an  aesthetic  equiva- 
lent to  the  lurid  setting  of  the  siege  of  Troy 
in  the  Iliad,  the  impressive  background  of 
the  French  Revolution. 

The  monumental  aspect  of  Goethe's  classi- 
cism is  to  be  seen  in  Hermann  und  Dorothea  ; 
but  in  other  works  produced  under  the  influ- 
ence of  the  same  ideas,  he  carried  his  theory 
to  such  logical  extremes  as  to  make  it 
exceedingly  difficult  for  the  modern  reader  to 
follow  him  with  any  kind  of  sympathy.  Die 
naturliche  Tochter  (The  Natural  Daughter)  is, 
in  its  cold  abstraction,  an  unreadable  tragedy 
to-day,  and  Pandora  is  so  wrapt  in  allegory 
as  to  be  incomprehensible  without  a  commen- 
tary. But  just  as  Schiller,  after  The  Bride 
of  Messina,  came  to  see  the  futility  of  his  one- 
sided devotion  to  the  antique,  so  Goethe,  less 
rapidly  it  may  be,  but  in  the  end  more  com- 
pletely, threw  over  his  classic  dogma  in  favour 
of  more  warm-blooded  and  national  forms 
of  literature.  In  1808  appeared  the  First  Part 


AGE    OF   CLASSIC   ACHIEVEMENT   127 

of  Faust.  It  would  be  unfair,  however,  to 
regard  the  writing  of  this,  the  supreme  poetic 
masterpiece  of  German  literature,  as  being  in 
direct  or  conscious  antagonism  to  the  rigidity 
of  Goethe's  classicism ;  for  the  greater  part 
of  it  had  been  written  long  before.  We  have 
already  seen  that  the  kernel  of  the  first  part, 
the  poignant  tragedy  of  Faust  and  Gretchen, 
goes  back  to  the  days  of  "  Storm  and  Stress." 
A  comparison  of  the  completed  poem  with 
this  early  form  of  it  shows  how  assiduously 
Goethe  had  worked  to  bring  his  drama  into 
line  with  his  new  theories  ;  but  the  original 
realism  did  not  admit  of  the  complete  trans- 
formation which  he  might  have  desired.  In 
any  case,  the  fundamental  changes,  the  widen- 
ing of  the  scope  of  the  poem,  had  already  been 
planned  in  the  early  years  of  his  friendship 
with  Schiller,  and  before  even  Hermann  und 
Dorothea  was  written.  Faust,  the  original 
"  Storm  and  Stress  "  hero,  has  in  the  drama  of 
1808  been  converted,  with  infinite  difficulty, 
and  by  no  means  complete  success,  into  a 
typical  representative  of  German  eighteenth- 
century  idealism  ;  the  young  rebel  has  become 
the  mature  philosopher ;  the  man  swayed 
solely  by  passions  has  become  the  earnest 
seeker  and  striver.  The  problem  of  Faust 


128  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

has  been  magnified  into  a  philosophical  and 
even  a  theological  one,  in  which  the  powers  of 
good  and  evil  enter  into  a  contract  to  test 
the  hero's  staying  power,  to  prove  his  moral 
worth.  Mephistopheles  has  become  a  philo- 
sophical illustration  of  the  role  which,  accord- 
ing to  the  optimist  Goethe,  evil  plays  in  the 
world,  the  work  of  a  Creator  who  is  necessarily 
responsible  for  the  evil  as  well  as  the  good. 
In  Mephistopheles's  description  of  himself  as  : 

Ein  Teil  von  jener  Kraft, 
Die  stets  das  Bose  will  und  stets  das  Gute  schafft 

("  a  part  of  that  power  which  always  wills  evil 
and  always  produces  good  "),  lies,  one  might 
say,  the  last  word  in  the  old  eighteenth-century 
optimism,  which  has  run  like  a  silver  thread 
through  every  phase  of  rationalism  from  the 
"  Theodicee  "  of  Leibniz  to  the  ethical  systems 
of  Kant  and  Fichte,  the  belief  in  the  essential 
goodness  of  God's  world.  The  early  Faust  had 
been  a  tragedy  of  personal  emotions  ;  the  new 
Faust  is  a  world-tragedy  of  the  human  spirit. 
The  early  Faust,  discontented  with  his 
studious,  ascetic  life,  clutched  at  the  pros- 
pects which  the  devil  held  out  to  him  of 
experiencing  the  happiness  he  had  missed  ; 
the  new  Faust  enters  into  a  wager  with  the 


AGE    OF   CLASSIC   ACHIEVEMENT   129 

emissary  of  evil,  which  virtually  resolves  itself 
into  a  trial  of  strength.  Faust's  damnation, 
according  to  the  new  version,  depends  on 
Mephistopheles's  power  to  satisfy  him,  to 
blunt  his  soul,  to  make  him  contented  with 
life  as  he  finds  it : 

Werd'  ich  zum  Augenblicke  sagen  : 
Verweile  doch  !     du  bist  so  schon  ! 
Dann  magst  du  mich  in  Fesseln  schlagen, 
Dann  will  ich  gem  zu  Grande  gehn  I 
Dann  mag  die  Totenglocke  schallen, 
Dann  bist  du  deines  Dienstes  frei, 
Die  Uhr  mag  stehn,  der  Zeiger  fallen, 
Es  sei  die  Zeit  f iir  mich  vorbei ! 

("  If  I  shall  ever  say  to  the  passing  moment : 
Tarry  awhile,  thou  art  so  fair  !  Then  thou 
mayst  cast  me  into  fetters,  then  I  will  willingly 
perish  !  Then  the  death-bell  may  toll,  then 
thou  art  free  from  thy  services.  The  clock 
may  stand,  the  index-hand  may  fall ;  then 
time  may  exist  no  more  for  me  !  ")  Now,  all 
this  implied  a  much  wider  outlook  on  human 
life  and  its  problems  than  was  originally  con- 
templated, or,  for  that  part,  could  have  been 
contemplated  by  the  young  poet  of  twenty- 
five.  One  feels  that,  had  this  been  originally 
thought  out,  the  Gretchen  tragedy,  as  it 
stands,  could  not  have  been  written ;  lor  it  is 
visibly  inconsistent  with  the  grave  problem 


130  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

that  is  here  initiated.  But  we  cannot  be 
grateful  enough  to  the  poet  for  allowing  no 
petty  considerations  of  artistic  harmony  or 
propriety  to  interfere  with  his  retention  of  the 
love-tragedy  in  its  original  form. 

But  one  thing  had  been  made  clear  by  the 
publication  of  Part  I.  :  the  completion  of  the 
Second  Part  was  a  necessity,  if  the  whole  poem 
were  not  to  remain  fragmentary  and  un- 
satisfying. The  wager  with  the  devil  implies 
that  Faust  is  merely  at  the  beginning  of  his 
struggle  with  the  powers  of  evil.  Through- 
out a  long  period  of  faltering  and  often 
interrupted  work,  Goethe  completed  the 
Second  Part  of  Faust,  but  not  until  the  very 
last  year  of  his  life.  In  many  ways  it  was 
unfortunate  that  the  end  should  have  thus 
been  deferred  until  the  mood  in  which  the 
First  Part  was  conceived  had  long  evaporated, 
until  Goethe's  own  literary  art  had  strayed 
into  regions  of  bloodless  allegory  and  philoso- 
phic speculation.  The  Second  Part  is  cer- 
tainly not  what  it  might  have  been,  had  it 
been  written  when  the  poet  had  still  his  vivid, 
realistic  hold  on  life,  and  saw  things  as  they 
were  ;  but  in  that  case  it  might  have  lost 
qualities  which  in  their  own  way  are  also 
priceless.  The  Second  Part  is  frankly  an 


AGE    OF   CLASSIC   ACHIEVEMENT   131 

allegory,  and  carried  out  with  a  great  deal 
of  the  wearisome  paraphernalia  of  allegory. 
It  embodies  Faust's  adventures  in  the  great 
world  ;  it  shows  us  Faust  at  the  court  of  a 
German  Emperor,  amusing  it  and  assisting  it 
with  the  ingenious  invention  of  paper  money. 
But  Faust  becomes  himself  entangled  in  his 
own  creations.  He  conjures  up  Helen  of 
Troy  for  the  delectation  of  his  new  patron, 
and  himself  becomes  an  ardent  worshipper 
of  this  incarnation  of  ideal  beauty.  And  so, 
through  the  greater  part  of  its  length,  the 
Second  Part  becomes  an  allegorical  embodi- 
ment of  what  we  have  just  characterised  as 
the  highest  achievement  of  German  classical 
poetry,  the  education  of  man  by  means  of 
the  beautiful.  Helen  is  that  priceless  Greek 
beauty,  which  Goethe  himself  endeavoured  in 
his  ripest  years  to  bring  back  from  antiquity ; 
to  introduce  into  his  own  essentially  northern 
literature,  as  Faust,  in  the  third  act,  brings 
Helen  to  his  mediaeval  German  castle.  Helen 
is  the  embodiment  of  that  aesthetic  humanism 
which  combines  humanity  and  beauty.  And 
when  Faust  fails,  or  rather  when  Helena  fails 
to  give  Faust  the  satisfying  happiness  which 
would  at  once  have  placed  him  at  the  mercy 
of  Mephistopheles,  when  the  child  that  she 


132  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

has  borne  him — in  whom  Goethe  allegorised 
Lord  Byron — soars,  Icarus-like,  too  high  and 
falls  dead  at  its  parents'  feet,  when  Helen 
fades  away,  leaving  only  her  mantle  behind 
her,  he  is  led  back  again  into  the  world  of 
reality.  His  new  activity  embraces  all  the 
arts  of  war  and  peace,  and  its  ultimate  end  is 
the  creation  of  a  new  society.  In  the  last  act 
Faust's  work  is  done;  a  happy  people  are 
busily  active  around  him,  active  on  land  that 
they  have  won  back  from  the  sea,  that  is  to 
say,  created,  in  the  sweat  of  their  brow.  Man 
can  do  no  more  ;  the  time  has  come  when 
Faust  can  no  longer  put  off  the  crucial  moment 
when  he  rests  satisfied. 

Ja  !  Diesem  Sinne  bin  ich  ganz  ergeben, 

Das  ist  der  Weisheit  letzter  Schluss  : 

Nur  der  verdient  sich  Freiheit  wie  das  Leben, 

Der  taglich  sie  erobern  muss. 

Und  so  verbringt,  umrungen  von  Gefalir, 

Hier  Kindheit,  Mann  und  Greis  sein  tuchtig  Jahr. 

Solch  ein  Gewimmel  mocht'  ich  sehn, 

Auf  freiem  Grund  mit  freiem  Volke  stehn, 

Zum  Augenblicke  diirft'  ich  sagen  : 

Verweile    doch  !     Du  bist  so  schon  ! 

Es  kann  die  Spur  von  meinen  Erdetagen 

Nicht  in  Aonen  untergehn  ! — 

Im  Vorgefiihl  von  solchem  hohen  Gliick 

Geniess'  ich  jetzt  den  hochsten  Augenblick. 

("  Yes,  I  am  quite  convinced  of  this  truth  ; 
it  is  the  last  conclusion  of  wisdom ;  only  he 


AGE   OF   CLASSIC   ACHIEVEMENT  133 

deserves  freedom  as  well  as  life,  who  must 
daily  conquer  them  anew.  And  so,  sur- 
rounded by  danger,  childhood,  manhood,  old 
age,  lives  its  active  life.  Such  a  throng  I  would 
fain  see,  would  fain,  stand  on  free  soil  amidst 
a  free  people.  To  the  fleeting  moment  I 
might  then  say  :  Linger  awhile  !  Thou  art 
so  fair  !  The  traces  of  my  earthly  days  cannot 
pass  away  in  aeons.  In  the  presentiment  of 
such  high  happiness  I  enjoy  the  supreme 
moment.") 

And  in  this  moment  the  devil  comes  forward 
to  claim  his  own,  to  seize  on  Faust's  soul  and 
carry  it  off  ;  but  this  is  not  so  easy  in  a  world 
where  it  is  the  function  of  evil  always  to  assist 
in  the  furthering  of  good.  The  heavenly  hosts 
interpose  and  save  Faust's  immortal  part 
from  the  clutches  of  Mephistopheles's  demons  ; 
they  bear  it  aloft  by  virtue  of  their  right  to 
save  one  whose  life  has  been  spent  in  constant 
effort  and  striving ;  and  at  the  Virgin's 
feet,  a  penitent,  "  once  called  Gretchen," 
interposes  for  Faust. 

In  the  wide  span  of  years  that  lay  in 
Goethe's  life  between  the  publication  of  the 
two  parts  of  this,  his  greatest  work,  he,  too, 
was  ceaselessly  active,  and  his  activity,  lil  e 
Faust's,  extended  over  every  intellectual  field. 


134  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

In  these  years  he  was  an  art  critic  of  weight, 
a  scientist  whose  opinions  bade  fair  to  revolu- 
tionise the  study  of  biology,  and  he  contributed 
researches  of  value  to  both  geology  and  optics. 
His  scientific  interests  did  not  now  imply, 
as  in  earlier  years,  any  weakening  of  his 
interest  in  poetry ;  for  here  the  universality 
of  his  sympathy  was  more  surprising  than 
ever.  He  kept  an  observant  eye  on  all  that 
was  best  in  the  literary  production  of  his 
own  land,  and  of  neighbouring  lands  as  well. 
He,  who  had  been  so  unswerving  an  advo- 
cate of  classicism  in  German  literature,  was 
genuinely  interested  in  the  Romantic  pro- 
duction of  Europe  during  the  first  third  of 
the  new  century.  More  than  this,  it  must  be 
frankly  admitted  that  Goethe's  own  literary 
work  in  these  years,  from  the  publication  of 
that  great  masterpiece  of  Romantic  art,  the 
First  Part  of  Faust,  onwards,  was  far  more 
Romantic  in  its  tendencies  than  Classic. 

Der  westostliche  Diwan  (The  West-Eastern 
Divan),  for  instance,  that  last  outburst  of 
Goethe/ s  inexhaustible  lyric  genius,  is,  in  its 
oriental  colouring  and  form,  distinctly  a 
contribution  to  Romantic  literature,  and,  we 
shall  see,  it  was  responsible  for  a  vast  body 
of  oriental  imitation  under  Romantic  auspices. 


AGE   OF   CLASSIC   ACHIEVEMENT   185 

The  lyric  inspiration  of  these  verses  shows 
no  falling  off  compared  with  Goethe's  earlier 
poetry ;  it  is  only  a  little  more  concentrated ; 
his  outlook  is  a  little  mellower,  his  passion 
more  reflective.  But  the  same  power  of  seeing 
naively  and  with  perfect  truth,  and  the  same 
command  of  melodious  cadence,  which  makes 
Goethe  the  supreme  lyric  genius  of  his  nation, 
are  here  too.  Der  westostliche  Diwan  is  the 
lyric  utterance  of  a  man  who  has  passed  the 
midday  of  life,  but  who  is  able,  by  virtue  of  the 
artist's  Protean  power,  to  project  himself  into 
his  youth  again ;  he  sees  that  youth,  as  it 
were,  by  borrowed  light,  and  with  added 
wisdom  and  objectivity. 

To  the  last  period  of  Goethe's  life  belong 
three  great  prose  works :  the  novel  Die 
Wahlverwandtschaften  (The  Elective  Affinities), 
his  autobiography,  Dichtung  und  Wahrheit 
(Poetry  and  Truth),  and  the  continuation  of 
Wilhelm  Meister,  which  bears  the  title 
Wilhclm  Meisters  Wanderjahre.  The  Elective 
Affinities  occupies  a  position  in  the  history  of 
German  prose  writing  analogous  to  Werther, 
in  so  far  as  it  stands  apart  from  the  main  line 
of  German  fiction  which  had  passed  through 
Wilhelm  Meisters  Apprenticeship.  It  is  the 
story  of  a  scientific  experiment  in  human 


136  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

attractions  ;  a  psychological  investigation  of 
the  incalculable  forces  which  manifest  them- 
selves as  love  between  man  and  woman. 
Thus,  like  Tasso,  it  is  essentially  a  book  in 
which  outward  happenings  are  of  little 
consequence,  where  the  entire  interest  is  con- 
centrated on  the  spiritual  development  of 
the  characters.  Husband  and  wife  are  torn 
asunder  by  cross  passions,  which  they  are 
unable  to  withstand;  and  Goethe  describes, 
with  merciless  scientific  callousness,  the 
tragedy  of  their  lives.  For  it  is  a  tragedy, 
and  the  firmness  with  which  the  poet  takes 
sides  with  the  moral  law  might  once  and  for 
all  vindicate  him  against  the  accusations  that 
used  to  be  current  against  him,  as  one  who 
prized  individual  freedom  above  the  con- 
straints of  society.  In  point  of  fact,  whatever 
Goethe  may  have  been  in  his  early  days  of 
"  Storm  and  Stress,"  there  was  now  no  more 
convinced  upholder  of  law  and  order,  as  laid 
down  in  the  code  of  morals  which  the  eigh- 
teenth century  respected,  than  he. 

The  essential  solidarity  of  society  is  also, 
in  part,  the  theme  of  Wilhelm  Meisters 
Wanderjdhre.  In  that  book  the  hero,  who, 
like  Faust,  had  in  his  "  Lehrjahre  "  to  face 
mainly  personal  problems,  from  which  he 


AGE   OF   CLASSIC   ACHIEVEMENT   137 

emerged  a  master  of  the  art  of  living,  has 
now — again  like  Faust — to  face  the  wider 
questions  imposed  on  him  as  a  member  of 
human  society.  His  "  Wander jahre "  are 
his  period  of  probation,  in  which  he  brings 
the  wisdom  acquired  in  the  "  Lehrjahre " 
to  bear  on  life  as  a  whole.  He  has  to  deal 
with  problems  of  education  as  applied  to 
his  own  son ;  the  subject  of  religion  is 
discussed  with  a  fulness  which  is  not  to  be 
found  in  any  other  of  Goethe's  works ;  and 
social  questions,  problems  of  industry  and 
the  rights  of  labour,  are  introduced  in  a 
manner  which,  so  far  from  being  influenced 
by  Goethe's  early  individualism,  has  been  by 
some  critics  characterised  as  nothing  more  nor 
less  than  unadulterated  socialism.  But,  as 
a  novel,  the  Wanderjahre  has  little  of  the 
charm  of  its  predecessor  ;  and  indeed,  one 
feels  that  Goethe  himself  fell  far  short  of  what 
he  had  once  dreamed  Meister's  Wanderjahre 
should  be. 

These  two  prose  works  are  necessarily 
overshadowed  by  Dichtung  und  Wahrheit  : 
Aus  meinem  Leben  (Poetry  and  Truth,  from  my 
Life],  undoubtedly  Goethe's  greatest  work 
of  sustained  prose.  It  is  the  story  of  his  life, 
told — not,  as  is  sometimes  thought,  with  an 


138  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

admixture  of  "  fiction  "  or  untruth  ;  that  is 
not  the  meaning  of  the  title — but  with  a 
glamour  of  retrospect,  and  from  a  point  of 
view  that  takes  stock  of  a  future  which  was 
still  shrouded  from  the  actors  in  the  drama ; 
the  "  poetry  "  here  is  the  poetry  of  Aristotle, 
which  is  "  more  philosophical  than  truth." 
With  the  most  painstaking  care  to  get  at  the 
real  facts  which  he  had  to  tell,  Goethe  unrolls 
the  history  of  his  youth  ;  he  describes  his 
childhood  in  Frankfort,  then  the  eventful 
period  of  his  life  from  his  first  immersion 
in  the  stream  of  Leipzig  literary  culture  in  the 
sixties,  when  Leipzig  had  still  not  far  ad- 
vanced beyond  Gottsched's  classicism  or,  at 
best,  Lessing's  neo-classicism — when  Klop- 
stock's  poetry  was  a  breath  from  another 
world — down  all  through  that  wonderful  age 
of  jubilant  youthfulness,  the  "  Storm  and 
Stress,"  to  his  departure  for  Weimar  in  1775. 
The  story  of  the  awakening  of  Goethe's 
genius  in  Strassburg  under  the  influence  of 
Herder's  stimulus  and  the  description  of  the 
idyll  in  Sesenheim,  one  of  the  most  charming 
love-stories  in  the  history  of  literature,  form 
unquestionably  the  most  important  part  of 
this  book  from  the  point  of  view  of  pure 
literature.  Dichtung  und  Wdhrheit  is  the 


AGE   OF   CLASSIC    ACHIEVEMENT   139 


spiritual  history  of  the  "  Storm  and 
Stress,"  seen  from  the  standpoint  of  its  leader, 
and  reviewed  by  that  leader  across  a  wide 
gulf  of  retrospect,  but  none  the  less  essentially 
true.  The  "  Storm  and  Stress  "  was,  of 
course,  not  all  bound  up  with  Goethe  ;  but 
there  was  nothing  vital  to  the  spirit  of  revolt 
which  Goethe  did  not  share,  which  he  did  not 
experience  with  an  intensity  greater  than 
his  fellows.  Thus  from  this  book  we  learn 
what  Rousseau  and  Goldsmith,  what  Shake- 
speare and  the  "  Volkslied,"  and  the  Gothic 
majesty  of  the  Strassburg  Minster,  meant  for 
German  thought  and  art,  and  once  we  under- 
stand these  things,  we  have  got  to  the  very 
heart  of  the  great  spiritual  revolution  in  the 
Germany  poetry  of  the  eighteenth  century. 

Unfortunately,  Goethe  had  not  the  courage 
to  carry  his  story  beyond  the  year  1775  ; 
it  breaks  off  with  his  departure  for  Weimar 
towards  the  end  of  that  year.  For  the  rest  of 
his  life  we  are  thrown  back  for  our  information 
on  his  enormous  correspondence,  and  his 
diaries,  which,  especially  as  he  grew  older, 
he  kept  with  a  fulness  that  leaves  nothing 
of  importance  unrecorded.  These  sources 
swell  enormously  the  record  of  Goethe's 
life  ;  but  they  do  not  take  the  place  of  what 


140  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

he  might  have  given  us  himself,  had  he 
continued  his  autobiography  ;  after  all,  they 
only  contain  the  "  truth  "  ;  what  we  miss  is 
the  higher  "  poetry  "  which  would  bind  this 
enormously  complicated  life  and  personality 
into  one  great  harmonious  whole.  Dichtung 
und  Wahrheit  has  nothing  to  tell  us  of  Goethe's 
emergence  into  the  serener  regions  of  classi- 
cism ;  or  of  that  phase  in  his  life  when  he 
gave  the  European  movement  inaugurated 
by  the  early  Italian  Renaissance  its  final  form. 
Still  less  have  we  reliable  information  from 
within  about  that  complicated  and  perhaps 
most  interesting  aspect  of  all  Goethe's  activity, 
his  relation  to  Romanticism,  and  to  the  ideas 
of  the  new  time.  Goethe's  life  extended  all 
through  the  movement  of  German  Roman- 
ticism which  has  to  be  considered  in  the 
next  chapter ;  he  may  even  have  been 
said  to  have  outlived  it.  We  might  perhaps 
go  still  further  and  say  that  this  poet, 
who,  under  Herder's  aegis,  caught,  amidst 
"  Storm  and  Stress,"  more  than  a  glimpse 
of  the  positive  individualism  of  Roman- 
ticism which  was  to  supersede  it  a  generation 
later,  also  realised  in  books  like  the  Elective 
Affinities  and  Wilhelm  Meisters  Wander jahre 
something  of  that  new  era  of  social  and 


AGE    OF   CLASSIC   ACHIEVEMENT   141 

political  interests  and  undreamt  of  develop- 
ments in  science,  which  was  to  take  the  place 
of  Romanticism  when  that  movement  had 
lived  its  life  to  an  end. 

It  will  no  doubt  have  struck  the  reader  that 
the  present  lengthy  chapter  on  Germany's 
classical  achievement  has  tapered  off  in  its 
later  stages  into  an  account  of  two  only  of 
her  poets,  of  Goethe  and  Schiller.  He  may 
reasonably  ask :  Does  Germany's  classic 
achievement  mean  only  Goethe  and  Schiller  ? 
To  a  certain  extent  it  does.  The  classic  age 
in  German  poetry  was  essentially  an  aristo- 
cratic age  ;  one  in  which  the  democracy  of 
letters  had  little  say.  Goethe  and  Schiller  were 
leaders,  but  leaders  who  could  by  no  means 
reckon  on  unanimous  followers ;  for  these 
followers  were,  to  a  great  extent,  still  merged 
in  the  seething  ferment  of  the  "  Storm  and 
Stress "  which  had,  as  we  have  seen,  in 
both  fiction  and  drama,  fallen  upon  evil 
days.  When  they  were  not,  like  Jean  Paul, 
merely  belated  "  Sturmer  und  Dranger " 
they  were  classicists  under  the  sway  of  a 
soul-destroying  rationalism  in  its  crasser 
forms  ;  they  clung  to  the  past,  the  past  of 
Lessing,  and  had  learned  nothing  from  the 
individualism  that  separated  them  from 


142  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

Lessing's  and  Gottsched's  age.  Thus,  they 
could  hardly  be  regarded  as  very  serviceable 
soldiers  in  the  classic  movement.  The  only 
hopeful  elements  in  the  great  proletariat  of 
German  letters  were  the  younger  generation 
who  had  eome  under  Goethe's  spell  in  their 
youth,  had  grown  up  with  Gotz  von  Berlich- 
ingen  and  Werther,  and  had  resisted  the  bland- 
ishments of  the  Enlightenment.  But  this 
younger  generation  formed,  in  a  way,  the 
least  reliable  forces  of  all ;  for  they  remained 
firm  in  their  individualism,  and  refused  to 
follow  the  great  poets  on  their  progress  towards 
a  purely  classical  idealism ;  they  banded 
themselves  together  to  initiate  a  new  literary 
movement,  which  ultimately  came  into  conflict 
with  Weimar  classicism.  They  brought  the 
irrepressible  antithesis  into  literature  once 
more,  that  antithesis  between  the  individual's 
claims  and  society's,  between  synthetic  law 
and  individual  liberty,  between  obedience  to 
restrictions  imposed  from  without  and  the 
spiritual  demand  for  inner  freedom,  in  other 
words,  between  Classicism  and  Roman- 
ticism. The  eighteenth  century  had  been  an 
age  of  steadily  advancing  classicism,  not,  it  is 
true,  without  certain  aberrations  of  an  entirely 
unclassic  nature ;  but  the  ground-tone  was  and 


AGE   OF   CLASSIC   ACHIEVEMENT   143 

remained  classic  and  social ;  the  new  century, 
which  might  be  said  to  open  with  the  publica- 
tion of  the  first  number  of  the  Athendum,  the 
organ  of  the  First  Romantic  School,  in  1798, 
became  the  century  of  Romanticism. 


CHAPTER   V 

ROMANTICISM 

IT  is  much  less  easy  to  find  a  formula  for  the 
nineteenth  century  in  Germany's  literature 
than  for  the  eighteenth.  In  the  first  place, 
the  literature  of  the  later  period  is  more 
varied ;  it  is  quantitatively,  if  not  perhaps 
qualitatively,  richer  ;  its  developments  and 
ramifications  are  more  complicated.  If  we 
like  to  continue  the  hypothesis  of  alternate 
oscillations  between  individualism  and  col- 
lectivism, Romanticism  and  Classicism,  which 
served  us  in  excellent  stead  in  the  eighteenth 
century,  we  shall  find  that — making  due 
allowance  for  modern  literature  being  influ- 
enced by  cross-currents  and  intellectual 
forces  other  than  the  purely  aesthetic  ones 
implied  in  the  catchwords  "  classic "  and 
"  romantic  "  —this  does  help  to  introduce  law 
and  order  into  the  maze  of  literary  production. 
The  nineteenth  century  opens,  for  instance, 
with  the  sharp  antithesis  of  a  Classic  move- 

144 


ROMANTICISM  145 

ment  centred  in  Weimar  and  a  new  Romantic 
movement,  associated,  for  a  time  at  least, 
with  the  neighbouring  university  town  of 
Jena.  Romanticism  was  in  the  ascendant, 
and  Germany  remained  Romantic  virtually 
until  the  death  of  Goethe  in  1832  ;  even  Goethe 
himself,  as  we  have  seen,  was  susceptible  to 
its  influence.  The  movement  which,  in  the 
thirties  and  forties,  supplanted  Romanticism 
can  hardly  be  described  as  classic,  but  it  was 
at  least  antagonistic  to  that  individualism 
which  was  the  life-blood  of  the  Romantic 
movement.  The  new  school  bore  the  name 
of  "  Young  Germany,"  and  was  political  and 
even  revolutionary  in  its  tendencies,  a  fact 
which  makes  the  most  convenient  dates  by 
which  to  define  its  place  in  the  century,  the 
revolutionary  years  of  1830  and  1848.  After 
"  Young  Germany "  the  pendulum  swung 
back  again  ;  there  came  a  movement  which 
had  more  sympathy  for  the  individual,  and 
was  tinged  with  the  old  Romantic  hues, 
in  so  far,  at  least,  as  these  were  consistent 
with  a  somewhat  sombre  pessimism.  German 
poetry  remained  under  the  signature  of 
this  modern  Romantic  pessimism  up  to  and 
beyond  the  war  of  1870-71,  when  the  Ger- 
mans gained  sufficient  self-confidence  to  begin 


146  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

reconstructing  their  literature  on  an  optimistic 
foundation  once  more. 

It  is  with  the  first  of  these  phases,  the 
Romantic  phase,  that  we  have  to  concern 
ourselves  in  the  present  chapter.  Here  again 
we  might,  in  the  interest  of  a  clearer  survey, 
have  recourse  to  a  rough  classification  of  this 
extremely  interesting  period  of  German 
literary  history.  It  has  been  shown  in  the 
previous  chapter  that  the  rise  of  Romanticism 
as  a  literary  power  was  rapid  and  unexpected  ; 
just  when  the  long  movement  of  German 
classicism  had,  with  the  publication  of 
Goethe's  Hermann  und  Dorothea,  reached  a 
kind  of  apex,  the  Romantic  School  appeared 
upon  the  scene,  as  a  veritable  bolt  from  the 
blue.  In  1798  the  school  was  formed  in  Berlin, 
but  very  shortly  afterwards  its  focus  of  activity 
was  removed  to  Jena,  next  door  to  the  little 
town  that  was  most  intimately  associated 
with  the  efflorescence  of  classicism.  The 
chief  members  of  the  first  Romantic  School 
were  Ludwig  Tieck,  a  native  of  Berlin,  who, 
without  possessing  genius  of  the  highest  kind, 
was  one  of  those  sensitive,  adaptable  writers 
that  are  often  of  greater  service  to  a  new 
movement  than  strongly  marked  geniuses ; 
Friedrich  Schlegel,  the  critical  leader  of  the 


ROMANTICISM  147 

School,  who  laid  down  its  theoretical  founda- 
tions; Friedrich's  brother  August  Wilhelm, 
who,  possessing  in  a  higher  degree  than  he 
the  gift  of  lucid,  attractive  expression, 
popularised  in  lectures  and  reviews  the  new 
standpoint  towards  literature ;  and,  most 
inspired  of  all,  Friedrich  von  Hardenberg, 
known  as  Friedrich  Novalis,  the  poet  of  the 
School,  who  died  of  consumption  at  the  age 
of  twenty-nine.  The  productivity  of  these 
Romantic  writers,  as  it  is  to  be  seen  in  their 
published  work,  was,  no  doubt,  small  in  pro- 
portion to  their  latent  strength.  The  main 
channel  of  their  ideas  was  a  journal,  Das 
Athenaum,  in  which  Friedrich  Schlegel  and 
Novalis  formulated  in  concentrated  aphor- 
isms and  subtle  poetry  the  tenets  of  the 
new  faith.  Novalis  wrote  the  typical  romance 
of  the  School,  Heinrich  von  Ofterdingen,  an 
allegory  of  the  Romantic  poet  and  his  search 
for  the  "  blue  flower "  of  Romantic  poetry ; 
and  Tieck  tried  his  hand  at  the  most  varied 
forms  of  Romantic  literature,  including  lyric 
as  well  as  drama,  but  with  most  success 
at  the  "  Marchen,"  or  "  fairy  tale."  The 
inference  one  is  most  likely  to  draw  from 
a  survey  of  this  activity  is  that  the  first 
Romantic  School  was  a  movement  which 


148  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

carried  its  head  in  the  clouds  ;  it  had  little  to 
do  with  everyday  affairs  ;  it  dreamt  great 
dreams  that  corresponded  to  no  reality  ;  its 
work  was  concerned  in  the  main  with  the 
expression  of  the  spiritual  and  the  intangible. 
It  touched  solid  earth  mainly  with  its  trans- 
lations, above  all,  with  that  masterwork  of 
A.  W.  Schlegel's  which  made  our  Shakespeare 
one  of  the  national  dramatists  of  Germany. 

The  short  life  of  the  first  Romantic  School — 
and  it  can  hardly  be  said  to  have  lived  beyond 
the  year  1804 — was  contemporary  with  a 
colourless  enough  period  of  German  political 
and  national  life.  The  great  Revolution  had 
hardly  come  to  an  end  in  France  when  the 
School  was  founded;  and  if  the  School 
expressed  anything  of  the  "  time-spirit "  at 
all,  it  was  that  despairing  and  unfortunate 
reaction  which  set  in  after  the  Revolution, 
a  reaction  which  in  Germany  expressed  itself 
in  a  revival  of  Catholicism  and  in  a  retrograde 
movement  towards  political  absolutism. 

The  second  phase  of  the  Romantic  move- 
ment was  associated  with  the  South  German 
university  town  of  Heidelberg  in  the  years 
1806-1808,  and  had  to  face  a  very  different 
state  of  affairs  in  the  political  world.  In 
1806,  the  Holy  Roman  Empire,  which  had 


ROMANTICISM  149 

been  gradually  tottering  to  its  fall,  came  defi- 
nitely to  an  end ;  Napoleon  shattered  it, 
and  in  shattering  it,  himself  laid  hand  on 
the  spoils.  In  that  year,  the  year  of  the  Battle 
of  Jena,  Napoleon  had  virtually  completed 
his  subjugation  of  the  German  peoples.  Thus 
the  background  to  this  new  phase  of  Roman- 
ticism was  the  steadily  advancing  progress 
of*  a  foreign  conqueror,  whom  even  Goethe 
at  last  believed  to  be  invincible.  Germany 
was  subjected  to  a  military  oppression 
such  as  she  had  not  known  as  a  nation 
since  the  Thirty  Years'  War.  But  this 
oppression  had  a  quite  unexpected  effect  on 
her.  It  awakened  her  sense  of  nationality  ; 
the  virtue  of  patriotism,  which  the  eighteenth- 
century  cosmopolitans  believed  they  had 
outgrown  and  consequently  despised,  was 
suddenly  called  into  life.  The  German  people, 
seeing  their  holiest  possessions  in  danger, 
realised  what  a  priceless  inheritance  had 
come  down  to  them  from  their  own  past,  and 
what  strength  lay  in  the  national  stirrings  of 
their  immediate  present. 

These  motives  of  national  pride  and  patriot- 
ism have  left  a  deep  mark  on  the  Romanti- 
cism of  HeidelJberg,  a  mark  which  is  totally 
absent  from  the  first  School.  The  chief  writers 


150  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

of  the  younger  school  were  Ludwig  Achim 
von  Arnim,  Clemens  Brentano,  and  Joseph 
Gorres ;  the  organ  of  the  school,  analogous 
to  the  Athenaum,  was  the  journal  Trostein- 
samkeit,  or  Zeitung  fur  Einsiedler  (Consolation 
in  Solitude,  or  Journal  for  Hermits}.  The 
dreams  of  the  first  Romantic  School  were 
here,  as  it  were,  brought  down  to  earth  ;  the 
new  school  wrote  of  the  national  life  of  the 
present,  or  penetrated  into  the  historical 
past — the  real  historical  past  of  the  German 
people,  not  an  imaginary  one,  such  as  that 
with  which  Novalis  had  been  satisfied ;  and 
its  most  characteristic  achievements  were 
the  anthology  of  national  folk-songs,  which 
Arnim  and  Brentano  edited  under  the 
fantastic  title,  Des  Knaben  Wunderhorn 
(The  Boy's  Magic  Horn],  and  the  collec- 
tion of  fairy-tales  of  the  people  edited  by 
the  brothers  Grimm.  Moreover,  in  immediate 
connection  with  the  activity  of  the  literary 
School  came  a  revival  of  historical  study, 
a  sympathetic  understanding  for  the  Middle 
Ages  and  the  beginnings  of  German  philo- 
logical science. 

The  next  phase  of  German  literature 
marked  an  even  more  startling  advance  on 
the  unworldly  beginnings  of  Romanticism ; 


ROMANTICISM  151 

for  it  brought  that  literature,  which  had  so 
rarely  in  its  past  come  into  touch  with  political 
actuality,  into  the  full  stream  of  the  patri- 
otic movement.  The  years  of  Napoleonic 
oppression  were  followed  by  the  Russian  Cam- 
paign, and  the  burning  of  Moscow  by  the  battle 
of  Leipzig  in  1813.  To  this  eventful  year 
belongs  the  remarkable  outburst  of  patriotic 
lyric,  whose  leaders  were  Theodor  Korner, 
Ernst  Moritz  Arndt  and  Max  von  Schenken- 
dorf .  The  quality  of  their  verse  may  be  often 
questionable;  but  the  intense  actuality  of 
the  struggle  in  which  they  took  part  and  to 
which  they  gave  expression,  made  the  Roman- 
tic literature  seem,  in  comparison,  a  mere 
dallying  with  things  that  did  not  matter. 
The  events  of  1813  are  reflected  in  all 
the  literature  of  the  time,  above  all,  in  the 
work  of  its  chief  dramatic  poet,  Heinrich  von 
Kleist,  whom  a  self-inflicted  death  cut  off  from 
seeing  the  promised  land  of  German  freedom. 
Kleist,  the  first  great  German  dramatist 
of  the  nineteenth  century,  shows,  compared 
with  Schiller,  what  an  extraordinary  in- 
cision the  new  factor  of  national  self-con- 
sciousness made  in  German  development. 
One  realises  how  cosmopolitan  the  older  poet 
was,  how  theoretical  his  attitude  to  national 


152  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

questions  must  have  been.  To  Kleist,  how- 
ever, Romanticism  remained  only  a  very  dimly 
realised  ideal.  He  began  with  an  unbalanced 
play,  Die  Familie  Schroffenstein,  in  which  the 
eighteenth-century  "  Storm  and  Stress  "  re- 
turns, tinged  with  Romantic  colours ;  then 
came  Romantic  dramas  like  Kdihchen  von 
Heilbronn,  which  seem  to  have  borrowed 
little  from  the  modern  spirit  but  an  intenser 
realism;  a  historical  play,  Prussia's  national 
drama,  Der  Prinz  von  Homburg,  in  which 
the  vacillation  and  uncertainty  of  the  age 
are  more  in  evidence  than  its  heroism  ;  and 
Die  Hermannsschlacht,  a  tragedy,  in  which, 
under  the  guise  of  a  far-removed  past,  the 
actual  political  conflicts  of  Kleist's  age  are 
fought  out  with  peculiar  rancour.  Kleist  is 
also  the  author  of  a  vigorous  realistic  story, 
Michael  Kohlhaas,  a  tale  of  the  sixteenth 
century,  which  does  service  as  a  channel  for 
that  spirit  of  national  revolt  and  independence 
which  culminated  two  years  after  Kleist's 
death  with  the  overthrow  of  Napoleon. 
Kleist  was  not  the  only  dramatist  of  this 
era,  but  the  only  great  one ;  the  others 
floundered  in  the  morass  of  unplastic  Ro- 
mantic imaginings,  which,  as  in  the  case 
of  Zacharias  Werner,  became  morbid  and 


ROMANTICISM  153 

unhealthy,  or  they  carried  the  gruesome 
fatalism  engendered  by  the  Romantic  pessi- 
mism, to  the  extremes  of  the  so-called 
"  Schicksalsdrama,"  or  "  Fate  drama,"  which 
Werner  himself  inaugurated  with  his  Der 
vierundzwanzigste  Februar  (The  Twenty- fourth 
of  February).  Romanticism  was,  in  fact,  fatal 
to  the  drama;  the  real  Romantic  poet  had 
little  dramatic  blood  in  his  veins  ;  and  he 
preferred  to  fight  for  his  ideas  anywhere 
except  in  the  world  of  the  theatre.  The  only 
form  of  drama  which  drew  real  strength  and 
encouragement  from  Romanticism  was  the 
lyric  opera  ;  the  operas  of  Weber  and  Marsch- 
ner,  the  music  of  Schubert,  and,  above  all,  of 
Robert  Schumann,  contain  the  very  essence  of 
the  German  Romantic  spirit. 

After  the  battle  of  Leipzig,  literature  had 
to  face  the  problem  of  its  relations  to  the 
national  life  anew  ;  Romanticism  could  not 
go  back  to  the  unworldliness,  or  other- 
worldliness,  of  the  early  school.  From  1813 
onwards  the  movement  became  dissipated, 
and  it  is  difficult  to  bring  it  within  an 
ordered  scheme.  The  Romantic  stream  was 
directed  into  the  most  varied  channels  ;  but 
its  new  and  hardly  won  realism,  its 
preoccupation  with  the  actualities  of  the 


154  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

national  life,  it  could  never  again  abandon. 
Not  that  the  political  conditions  which 
followed  the  overthrow  of  Napoleon  were 
very  inspiring  ;  the  inevitable  reaction  set 
in  and  weighed  heavily  on  the  German 
peoples.  The  Congress  of  Vienna  imposed 
upon  the  nation  a  burden,  in  some  respects, 
even  heavier  to  bear  than  that  from  which 
they  had  so  heroically  freed  themselves.  The 
policy  of  Metternich,  which  was  particularly 
galling  in  Vienna,  extended  its  baleful  and 
stifling  influence  over  the  whole  art  and 
poetry  of  the  German  world.  There  was 
nothing  at  all  inspiring  in  political  life 
to  warrant  a  continuation  of  that  close 
alliance  between  poetry  and  politics  which 
had  been  evoked  in  1813  ;  and  consequently 
we  find  Romanticism  assuming  the  most 
unexpected  forms  in  the  period  now  to  be 
considered.  Its  most  interesting  manifesta- 
tions are  to  be  seen  in  Berlin  and  in  Swabia. 
After  they  had  left  Heidelberg  in  1808, 
Arnim  and  Brentano  settled  in  Berlin  and 
became  the  nucleus  of  a  kind  of  third  Romantic 
School  there,  although  the  word  "  school  " 
for  so  loosely  connected  and  varied  a  group 
of  writers  is  rather  a  misnomer.  Unless  in 
one  or  two  cases,  where  the  bond  of  union 


ROMANTICISM  155 

was  personal  friendship,  there  was  little 
unanimity  amongst  these  men  ;  each  went  his 
own  way  and  cultivated  his  own  particular 
domain.  The  only  matters  on  which  they 
were  generally  in  agreement,  were  a  common 
opposition  to  such  vestiges  of  the  rationalistic 
spirit  as  still  lingered  in  Berlin,  and  a  common 
admiration  for  the  genius  of  Goethe.  Both 
Arnim  and  Brentano  did  their  best  literary 
work  in  Berlin.  Arnim  wrote  several  admir- 
able stories,  the  best  being  a  historical  novel, 
Die  Kronenwdchter  (The  Crown  Guardians],  in 
which  the  century  that  formed  the  background 
of  Kleist's  realistic  Michael  Kohlhaas  is  made 
to  serve  the  same  purpose  for  a  story  in  the 
Romantic  manner.  The  "  Crown  Guardians" 
are  a  secret  society,  whose  aim  is  a  revival  of 
Barbarossa's  empire  under  the  descendants 
of  his  race.  Brentano,  who,  as  the  years  went 
on,  drifted  more  and  more  into  a  fatalistic, 
Catholic  mysticism,  wrote  a  fine  drama  of  the 
vague  Romantic  kind  in  Die  Grundung  Prags 
(The  Founding  of  Prague),  a  play  alight  with 
all  the  high  colours  of  Romanticism,  and  as 
varied  and  variegated  as  any  of  Tieck's  dramas. 
He  also  produced  in  these  later  years  his 
Romanzen  vom  Rosenkranz,  a  mystic  religious 
allegory,  or  collection  of  allegories,  into  which 


156  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

he  wove  the  spiritual  history  of  his  own  life ; 
the  allegory  may  be  at  times  too  subtle  and 
elaborate,  but  Brentano's  lyric  inspiration 
shows  to  advantage  in  his  melodious  stanzas. 
To  the  Berlin  circle  belonged  also  Adelbert 
von  Chamisso,  a  Erench  emigrant,  who 
ultimately  became  the  most  German  of 
German  poets.  Chamisso  owes  his  place  in 
German  literature  and  in  German  affections 
to  his  heartfelt,  simple  lyrics,  which  breatlie 
the  very  essence  of  the  national  "  Volkslied  "  ; 
Chamisso  catches,  as  no  other  of  the  Romantic 
lyricists,  its  peculiarly  childlike  and  nai've 
spirit.  The  scientist  in  Chamisso — he  was  a 
botanist  by  profession — helped  him  to  see 
things  and  people  and  emotions  as  they  were, 
and  neutralised  the  distorting  effect  of  the 
Romantic  spectacles.  Chamisso  has  another 
claim  to  a  place  in  his  adopted  nation's 
affections  with  his  story  of  Peter  Schlemihl, 
a  delightful  fairy-tale  of  the  man  who  sold  his 
shadow  to  the  devil.  Like  Michael  Kohlhaas, 
Schlemihl  is,  however,  also  an  allegory  of  the 
outwitted  German  people,  who  had  sold  their 
birthright  at  the  Vienna  Congress,  and  under 
Metternich  were  fast  drifting  back  into  the 
spiritual  bondage,  from  which  nothing — so,  at 
least,  it  seemed  to  contemporaries — could  ever 


ROMANTICISM  157 

set  them  free ;  Peter  Schlemihl,  although  its 
allegorical  meaning  is  hidden  under  the  con- 
vincing realism  of  its  style,  is  thus  also  a 
significant  document  of  its  time. 

Amongst  the  Berlin  Romanticists  it  is  also 
usual  to  number  Joseph  von  Eichendorff, 
although  his  connection  with  Berlin  was  of 
the  slightest ;  but  he  was,  at  least,  a  North 
German  Romanticist,  being  by  birth  a  Silesian. 
Eichendorff  is  one  of  the  very  greatest  of  the 
Romantic  singers,  and  one  of  the  most 
inspired  lyric  poets  Germany  possesses.  But 
this  statement  has  to  be  qualified  by  the 
admission  that  his  range  was  not  a  wide  one, 
and  the  mass  of  the  great  poetry  which 
justifies  our  claim  for  him,  is  slight  in  pro- 
portion to  his  complete  work.  To  no  other 
singer  of  this  time  does  nature  appear  with 
such  alluring  charm  as  to  Eichendorff ;  his 
best  inspiration  he  drew  from  the  German 
forest,  and  no  one  lived  in  more  intimate  com- 
munion than  he  with  the  "  great  god  Pan." 
The  joy  of  the  wanderer  over  hill  and 
dale,  the  many  voices  of  Nature,  interpreted 
with  a  keen  Romantic  intuition  of  her  inner 
meaning  and  message,  are  echoed  in  this 
poetry.  The  distilled  essence  of  Eichendorff' s 
genius  is  to  be  found,  apart  from  his  great 


158  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

lyrics,  in  that  most  delightful  of  Romantic 
books,  his  Aus  dem  Leben  eines  Taugenichts 
(From  the  Life  of  a  Good-for-Nothing).  This 
is,  in  form,  a  "  Novelle  "  or  short  story,  but 
it  is  really  only  a  series  of  lyric  emotion's, 
expressed  in  prose  as  well  as  verse,  and  bound 
loosely  together  by  an  impossible  story  of  a 
careless  German  wanderer,  whose  wanderings 
frankly  do  not  matter.  All  we  do  care  for 
is  the  poet's  power  of  attuning  nature  to 
human  moods.  Eichendorff's  other  work  is  of 
comparatively  little  value ;  his  one  long 
novel,  Ahnung  und  Gegenwart  (Presentiment 
and  Actuality},  takes  its  place  in  the  chain 
of  amorphous  Romantic  fiction,  but  it, 
too,  is  the  unsuccessful  attempt  of  a  purely 
lyric  talent  to  write  a  novel ;  and  Eichendorff's 
plays  are  almost  more  eloquent  than  his 
fiction  in  proclaiming  the  limitations  of  the 
lyric  poet's  genius. 

The  third  in  the  trio  of  great  Romantic 
singers  at  this  time  was  Wilhelm  Miiller,  whose 
life  was  cut  short  at  the  early  age  of  twenty- 
seven.  Miiller  is  akin  both  to  Chamisso  and 
to  Eichendorff ;  he  has  the  former's  power 
of  reproducing  the  subtle  charm  of  the  "  Volks- 
lied,"  that  perfect  simplicity  of  utterance 
without  which  no  German  lyric  singer  has  ever 


ROMANTICISM  159 

risen  to  greatness ;  and  he  has  the  latter's 
intense  faith  in  the  healing  power  of  Nature. 
But  his  range  is  wider,  or  at  least  gave  promise 
of  becoming  wider,  than  that  of  either  of  these 
men.  His  popular  songs  are  more  varied  in 
their  expression  ;  and  his  love  of  nature  ex- 
tended to  a  domain  with  which  no  other  singer 
but  himself  and  Heine  in  modern  German 
poetry  are  in  any  measure  of  sympathy,  the  sea. 
In  this  respect,  indeed,  he  was  Heine's  model. 
Besides  all  these  things,  Miiller  was  a  political 
singer ;  his  Lieder  dcr  Griechen  (Songs  of  the 
Greeks)  were  the  first  outstanding  political 
poetry  the  Germans  could  point  to  since  the 
War  of  Liberation.  Here,  in  fact,  we  have 
again  evidence  of  the  desire  to  come  to  grips 
with  realities  which  beset  the  German  Ro- 
mantic movement  in  its  later  developments, 
in  spite  of  all  its  unworldly  longings.  Once 
the  new  literary  faith  had  identified  itself 
with  the  holy  cause  of  freedom,  it  could  not 
go  back  to  its  former  quietism  again ;  and 
so  we  find  quite  an  extensive  literature  at 
this  time,  inspired  by  the  struggle  of  Greece 
and  Poland  for  freedom,  and  yet  essentially 
Romantic,  a  literature  that  looked  up  with 
blind  devotion  to  Byron  as  its  master.  The 
political  tendencies  of  these  younger  Roman- 


160  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

ticists,  however,  gradually  passed  over  into 
that  new  movement  in  German  literature 
which,  as  we  shall  see  presently,  superseded 
Romanticism. 

But  the  main  point  to  observe  is  that 
Romanticism  was  gradually  outgrowing  its 
old  dogmas  ;  the  changes  had  been  rung  so 
often  on  the  R  omantic  themes  and  moods  that 
new  experiences,  thoughts  and  emotions,  new 
new  fields  to  conquer,  were  urgently  called 
for.  And  in  their  search  for  fresh  materials 
the  younger  poets  lighted,  not  merely  upon  the 
struggle  of  oppressed  peoples  to  retain  their 
threatened  national  independence,  but  also — 
guided  by  Goethe's  example — it  went  still 
further  afield  and  found  a  new  source  of 
inspiration  in  the  Romanticism  of  the  Orient, 
the  poetry  of  Persia  and  the  story  of  Arabia. 
The  closing  period  of  Romanticism  saw  the 
rise  of  a  vast  literature  of  orientalism  which 
maintained  its  hold  on  German  popular 
sympathies  until  long  after  Romanticism 
itself  had  given  place  to  another  phase  in 
the  literary  development.  The  first  poet  of 
eminence  who  felt  this  fascination  of  the 
East  was  Friedrich  Riickert,  one  of  the 
masters  of  verse-form  in  German  poetry. 
With  an  astounding  lyric  fertility,  Riickert 


ROMANTICISM  161 

poured  out  volume  after  volume  of  poetry, 
which  was  for  the  most  part  cast  in  orien- 
tal moulds,  and  distinguished  by  a  delicacy 
of  fancy  and  an  irresistible  melodious  charm. 
Everything  Riickert  touched  seemed  to  turn 
to  poetry.  But  not  all  his  verse  is  oriental ; 
his  purely  personal  poetry  covers  a  wide  range 
of  emotional  expression,  from  the  jubilation 
of  his  early  love  songs  to  the  tragic  poignancy 
of  those  wonderful  dirges,  the  Kindertoten- 
lieder,  inspired  by  the  tragic  death  of  two  of 
his  children. 

In  the  field  of  the  novel  the  indications  that 
Romanticism  was  approaching  its  end  are 
more  clearly  marked.  Friedrich  de  la  Motte 
Fouque  laboured,  with  a  talent  which,  it 
must  be  confessed,  was  none  of  the  strongest, 
all  his  life  long  to  maintain  the  vitality  of  the 
Romantic  fiction  of  chivalry  and  mediaevalism. 
He  tried,  without  conspicuous  success,  to 
bolster  that  fiction  up  with  northern  mytho- 
logy and  with  an  admixture  of  the  orientalism 
which,  as  we  have  just  seen,  was  coming  into 
fashion  with  a  wider  and  truer  knowledge  of 

O 

the  East.  But  there  was  something  old- 
fashioned  about  his  novels  from  the  first ;  and 
the  best  of  them,  indeed  the  only  one  that 
can  still  claim  full  vitality  in  our  time,  is  a 


162  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

little  "  Marchen,"  or  fairy  tale,  the  story  of 
Undine,  the  water-sprite  on  whom  love  for 
a  mortal  confers  a  soul.  But  Fouque,  to  be 
just  to  him,  also  sowed  seed  that  bore  fruit 
in  later  ages  ;  it  was  he  who  first  adapted 
to  the  modern  theatre  the  story  of  Siegfried 
and  the  Nibelungs.  His  Held  im  Norden 
(The  Hero  of  the  North)  is  the  legitimate 
ancestor  of  Hebbel's  Nibelungen  and  Wag- 
ner's Ring  des  Nibelungen. 

A  much  more  powerful  novelist  of  the  later 
Romantic  period,  and  one  of  the  greatest 
masters  of  prose  fiction  that  Germany  has 
ever  known,  was  Ernst  Theodor  Amadeus 
Hoffmann.  It  is  true,  he,  too,  revelled  in  a 
rather  morbid,  degenerate  kind  of  fiction,  the 
supernatural  story,  with  which  the  eighteenth- 
century  writers  had  already  made  their  readers' 
flesh  creep  ;  he  suffered,  too,  by  coming  at  the 
end  instead  of  at  the  beginning  of  the  move- 
ment. By  temperament  Hoffmann  was  one  of 
those  distraught  natures  so  frequent  in  this 
age,  never  wholly  sane,  and  in  his  later  years, 
when  his  health  was  ruined  by  drink  and 
dissipation,  not  sane  at  all.  The  nightmare 
world  of  creepy,  uncanny  sights  and  sounds 
which  he  describes,  responded  to  an  immediate 
craving  of  his  own  ghost-haunted  life.  At 


ROMANTICISM  163 

the  same  time,  when  one  remembers  the 
wise  common-sense  and  the  objective  outlook 
of  those  of  his  novels  in  which  he  draws  on  his 
own  retrospect,  or  describes  historical  events 
which  did  not  admit  of  being  modified  or 
warped,  one  cannot  help  regretting  that 
Hoffmann  had  to  expend  so  much  of  his 
magnificent  genius  as  a  story-teller  on  morbid 
themes.  For  Hoffmann  was,  no  doubt,  a 
writer  of  extraordinary  gifts ;  the  French,  who 
have  a  keen  appreciation  for  genius  of  this 
kind,  at  once  scented  this  power  in  Hoffmann 
and  took  him,  as  they  took  no  other  German 
author  of  the  nineteenth  century,  to  their 
hearts.  The  crying  evil  of  the  whole  Roman- 
tic fiction  was  its  lack  of  plasticity ;  its 
wilful  determination,  as  in  Arnim's  case,  not  to 
be  plastic  and  real,  not  to  renounce  "  the  light 
that  never  was  on  land  or  sea"  ;  the  novels 
of  the  school  are,  for  the  most  part,  shadowy 
phantasmagories,  which  have  ceased  to  grip 
men's  minds,  now  that  the  Romantic  faith 
has  passed  away.  Not  even  Sir  Walter  Scott's 
influence,  which  for  a  time  supplanted  all 
that  the  Romanticists  had  tried  to  do  in 
historical  fiction,  succeeded  in  out-rooting 
this  indefatigable  tendency  to  substitute 
shadowy  spiritualisation  for  realities.  Now, 


164   THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

it  was  just  in  confronting  this  tendency 
that  Hoffmann's  power  and  success  lay.  He 
brought  to  bear  on  themes  that  were  in  no 
degree  inferior  in  their  weird,  romantic  appeal 
to  anything  that  his  predecessors  had  at- 
tempted, a  straightforward,  matter-of-fact 
treatment,  a  clear,  realistic  style,  which  lay 
beyond  their  power ;  he  made  characters 
stand  out  living  from  his  page,  and  invested 
unreal  events,  however  great  the  claims 
they  make  on  our  credence,  with  perfect 
credibility.  He  justified  Lessing's  demand 
that  if  the  poet  introduces  the  supernatural 
at  all,  he  must  make  us  believe  in  his  super- 
natural. 

We  have  just  referred  to  the  influence  in 
Germany  of  Sir  Walter  Scott.  That  influence 
was  immediate  and  overpowering ;  Scott 
appealed  particularly  to  the  German  mind, 
which  was,  no  doubt,  conscious  of  a  certain 
failure  on  its  own  part  to  make  the  nation's 
past  live  again  in  imaginative  literature. 
After  all,  the  fiction  of  the  Romantic  age 
corresponds  very  imperfectly  to  the  enor- 
mous strides  which  the  historical  under- 
standing of  the  Middle  Ages  had  made 
under  the  influence  of  Romanticism.  Now, 
Scott  provided  exactly  that  trend  towards  day- 


ROMANTICISM  165 

light,  sanity  and  realism — always,  of  course, 
comparatively  speaking,  with  reference  to 
the  existing  German  literature  of  the  kind — 
which  Germany  needed.  The  imitations  of 
Scott  were  many  and,  for  the  most  part,  of 
inferior  calibre  to  their  originals.  One  novel 
alone  deserves  to  be  singled  out  as,  in  a  poetic 
sense,  successful,  and  that  is  the  romance  from 
Wiirttemberg  history,  Lichtenstein,  by  the 
young  Swabian,  Wilhelm  Hauff.  Almost  gro- 
tesque was  the  effect  of  Scott  on  another — this 
time  a  Prussian — writer,  Wilhelm  Haring,  who 
preferred  to  write  under  the  pseudonym  of 
"  Wilibald  Alexis."  Haring  began  his  career, 
not  exactly  by  translating  Scott,  but  by 
imitating  him  and  passing  off  his  imitations 
as  actual  translations  !  And  so  skilful  was  his 
deceit  that  one  of  these  books  wras  actually 
translated  into  English  and  presented  to  the 
English  public  in  all  good  faith,  as  a  hitherto 
unknown  romance  by  Scott !  Haring  has 
been  called  the  "  German  Scott  "  ;  but  he  has 
nothing  of  Scott's  serene  Romantic  faith,  nor 
has  he  his  wide  humanity  and  range  of  vision  ; 
he  is  really  less  entitled  to  be  called  the  German 
Scott  than  Dumas  is  to  be  called  the  French 
one.  But  within  his  own  literature  the 
designation  has  a  certain  justification;  for 


166  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

in  his  riper  novels  of  Brandenburg  history, 
he  certainly  succeeded  in  creating  a  type  of 
historical  fiction  which  was  sufficiently  inde- 
pendent of  the  Waverley  Novels  to  be  in  a 
true  and  exclusive  sense  national.  The  firm, 
clear  outlines  of  Scott  he  never  attained  to  ; 
and  we  doubt  if  books  like  Die  Hosen  des 
Herrn  von  Bredow  (The  Breeches  of  my  Lord 
Bredow),  or  Ruhe  ist  die*  erste  Burgerpflicht 
(Coolness  is  the  Citizen's  First  Duty),  have 
penetrated  much  beyond  Germany ;  but 
they  are,  all  the  same,  Prussia's  national 
novels. 

Amidst  the  disintegration  of  German  Ro- 
manticism there  was  one  group  of  poets  which 
possessed  a  certain  cohesiveness,  and  which 
was  sufficiently  at  one  in  its  aim  to  be  digni- 
fied by  the  name  of  a  school.  This  group 
consisted  of  South  German  or,  more  exactly, 
Swabian  writers.  In  its  origins,  the  Swabian 
School  was  more  or  less  closely  associated  with 
the  second  stage  of  the  movement,  the  Heidel- 
berg Romanticists  ;  it  set  out  from  a  similar 
basis,  namely,  an  undivided  faith  in  the  poetic 
capacities  of  the  German  "  Volk,"  in  the  value 
of  the  "  Volkslied  "  as  a  form  of  national  lyric 
expression,  and  with  a  desire  to  pierce  behind 
the  veil  that  still  concealed  the  romantic 


ROMANTICISM  167 

Middle  Ages.  It,  too,  differed  from  the  first 
school  in  its  greater  respect  for  reality ;  in  its 
adherence  to  a  Romanticism  that  takes  count 
of  the  world  as  it  is.  But  although  endowed 
with  greater  tenacity  than  other  forms  of 
Romanticism,  this  naturalistic  phase  was  in 
some  respect  more  limited,  less  capable  of 
progressive  development.  The  particularism 
of  a  restricted  province  lay  a  little  heavy 
on  the  Swabians  ;  their  outlook  rarely  got 
beyond  their  own  geographical  boundaries. 
Another  disadvantage  under  which  they 
suffered,  was  that,  in  a  land  without  any 
semblance  of  metropolitan  life,  literature 
could  not  be  a  self-supporting  profession ; 
it  was  consequently  degraded  to  a  dilettante 
occupation  of  men  whose  serious  business 
in  life  lay  in  quite  other  fields.  And  yet,  in 
spite  of  this,  Swabia  at  this  time  gave  Ger- 
many several  poets  who  have  left  an  abiding 
impress  on  the  literature  of  the  nineteenth 
century. 

The  first  place  in  this  School  belongs,  as  a 
matter  of  course,  to  Ludwig  Uhland  ;  he  was 
the  oldest  member,  his  early  poems  dating 
back  to  the  first  decade  of  the  century,  and 
he  is,  without  question,  the  most  representa- 
tive poet  of  the  group.  Uhland  was  a  mediae- 


168  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

val  scholar  of  notable  rank ;  he  was  a 
university  professor  for  a  time  ;  and  he  even 
played  an  important  role  in  politics  when,  for 
a  brief  space  in  1848,  it  seemed  as  if  there 
were  some  hope  for  a  larger  political  life  in 
the  conglomerate  of  nations  that  spoke  the 
German  tongue.  As  a  man  of  letters, 
Uhland  owes  his  reputation  to  his  ballads  and 
his  lyric  poetry.  To  the  German  people  he 
appeared  as  the  poet  who  was  destined  to 
carry  on  the  tradition  of  the  popular  ballad 
which  Schiller  had  created  ;  and  in  the  esteem 
of  his  countrymen  he  was  regarded,  through- 
out the  nineteenth  century,  as  second  only  to 
Schiller.  Uhland's  ballads  have,  at  least 
after  the  first  ultra-Romantic  period  of  his 
early  life  was  over,  the  same  firm  outlines 
which  distinguished  Schiller's  ;  they  voice  a 
practical,  common-sense  outlook  on  life,  which 
appealed  exactly  to  an  age  when  the  Romantic 
faith  was  waning.  But  notwithstanding  our 
appreciation  of  Uhland's  gifts  as  a  poet,  we 
have  the  feeling  that  his  theoretic  studies, 
which  engendered  an  imitative  activity  in- 
compatible with  naive  genius,  set  peculiar 
limitations  to  his  powers. 

The     other     members      of     the     Swabian 
School,    as     Justinus     Kerner    and    Gustav 


ROMANTICISM  169 

Schwab,  are  hardly  important  enough  to 
demand  detailed  consideration  here.  They 
all  possessed,  in  a  greater  or  less  degree,  the 
qualities  apparent  in  Uhland,  the  most 
dominant  being  sympathy  with  the  people, 
what  we  might  call  the  "  Volkslied  "  note ; 
but,  one  and  all,  they  assiduously  avoided 
the  deeper,  more  tragic  sides  of  literature ; 
they  are  indifferent  novelists  and  not  drama- 
tists at  all.  But  there  is  one  important 
exception.  The  school  numbered  among  its 
adherents  one  man  of  elemental  lyric 
genius,  Eduard  Morike.  Morike  is  a  great 
poet,  and  stands  in  the  very  first  rank  of 
Germany's  singers  ;  his  work  is  small  in  its 
range,  and  only  a  comparatively  small  number 
of  his  lyrics  are  of  the  first  rank ;  but  these 
retain,  as  little  else  of  this  period,  their 
pristine  freshness  ;  they  are  to  be  numbered 
among  the  few  poems  of  the  Romantic  age 
on  which  the  passing  of  time  has  had  no  dim- 
ming effect.  The  qualities  that  make  Morike, 
who  was  a  Swabian  pastor,  and  later  professor 
of  German  literature  in  Stuttgart,  great,  are 
an  extreme  delicacy  of  perception,  an  in- 
stinctive apprehension  of  the  most  fleeting 
motives  and  emotions,  and  that  understand- 
ing for  the  spiritual  significance  of  nature's 


170  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

phenomena,  which  in  all  ages  have  been  the 
distinctive  feature  of  the  German  lyric  at  its 
best.  Morike  wrote  one  or  two  admirable 
short  stories,  and  also  a  novel,  Maler  Nolten 
(Nolten  the  Painter],  which,  in  spite  of  its 
ineffectual  construction  and  the  lack  of  all 
dramatic  power  in  presenting  character, 
must  be  given  a  place  in  the  main  line 
of  Romantic  fiction  from  Wilhelm  Meister  to 
Gottfried  Keller's  Der  grune  Heinrich. 

Thus,  even  if  we  feel  a  certain  disappoint- 
ment at  the  actual  literary  achievement  of  the 
Swabian  School,  the  fact  remains  that,  in  the 
days  of  declining  Romanticism,  and,  still 
more,  in  the  shallow  epoch  of  political  litera- 
ture that  superseded  Romanticism,  this  school 
was  the  most  significant  force  that  made  for 
poetry,  at  least  in  South  Germany  and  Austria. 
The  greatest  modern  lyric  poet  of  Austria, 
Nicolaus  Lenau,  came  into  personal  touch 
with  the  Swabians  in  the  beginnings  of  his 
literary  life,  and  they  helped  him  to  publish 
his  first  volume  of  poetry.  Lenau  was  a 
child  of  the  Hungarian  pusta,  and  the  wide, 
lonely  moors  of  his  native  land,  with  their 
deep,  inarticulate  pessimism,  provides  the 
ground  note  of  all  his  poetry.  Even  when,  dis- 
gusted with  his  native  land,  he  sought  a  new 


ROMANTICISM  171 

home  in  America,  the  American  prairie  only 
touched  again  the  old  chords  in  his  soul ; 
the  hopes  he  had  cherished,  that  he  might  find 
what  he  sought  in  the  "  land  of  freedom  " 
were  rudely  dashed  to  the  ground,  and  his 
Austrian  melancholy  set  in  again  with  tenfold 
force.  After  his  return  to  Europe  his  pessi- 
mism rapidly  deepened ;  and  the  unhappy 
poet  became  hopelessly  insane.  Lenau's 
poetry,  together  with  that  of  Leopardi  in 
Italy,  is  the  most  concentrated  expression  of 
the  European  pessimism  of  his  century.  But 
in  Lenau's  case  it  is,  one  might  say,  a  purely 
emotional  pessimism,  a  subjective  melancholy 
akin  to  Byron's  ;  it  has  nothing  of  the  philo- 
sophical basis  afforded  by  Arthur  Schopen- 
hauer, which  played  so  large  a  role  in  the 
German  pessimistic  literature  of  the  next 
generation.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  Schopen- 
hauer, although  his  masterwork,  Die  Welt  als 
Wille  und  Vorstellung  (The  World  as  Will  and 
Idea],  had  appeared  as  early  as  1819,  made 
little  headway  during  the  first  half  of  the 
century.  The  dominant  Hegelianism  was  too 
strong  for  him ;  it  was  not  until  the  disappoint- 
ment of  Germany's  hopes  by  the  failure  of 
the  Revolution  of  1848  that  there  was  room 
for  a  thoroughgoing  pessimism  in  the  German 


172  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

mind.  In  Austria,  however,  the  conditions 
were  different ;  she  suffered,  as  we  have 
seen,  far  more  under  the  Metternich  regime 
before  1848  than  after  that  date  ;  and  the 
resigned,  pessimistic  strain  in  her  literature 
was  due — that  is  to  say,  as  far  as  political 
conditions  had  anything  to  do  with  it  at  all 
— to  that  regime.  Lenau  is  an  inspired  poet 
of  the  first  rank  ;  the  haunting  melancholy 
of  his  verses  comes  from  sources  that  lay 
deeper  than  the  conventional  Romanticism, 
and  give  him  a  place  by  himself  in  the 
literature  of  the  German  tongue  ;  no  poet  of 
his  time,  not  even  the  unhappy  Holderlin, 
whose  fate  was  similar  to  Lenau' s,  touched 
such  depths  of  divine  despair  as  he.  The 
whole  Byronic  "  Weltschmerz,"  which  so 
deeply  impressed  his  imagination,  shaded 
off  here  into  the  darkest  and  most  hopeless 
gloom.  In  many  ways,  Lenau 's  genius  was 
on  a  grander  scale  than  that  of  his  fellow 
lyricists ;  he  wrote  epics  and  epic  drama, 
such  as  Die  Albigenser  and  Faust,  poems  which 
show  a  strength  of  handling  and  an  epic  sweep 
of  imagination,  which  the  purely  lyric  poet 
rarely  attains  to.  One  feels — and  Lenau  is  not 
the  only  Austrian  of  this  age  of  whom  this 
might  be  said — that  Austria  possessed  in  him 


ROMANTICISM  173 

a  great  poetic  genius,  who  needed  only  the 
sunshine  of  happier  conditions  to  have  un- 
folded his  powers  in  all  their  manifold  richness. 

The  tragic  aspect  of  the  Metternich  regime 
in  Austria  is,  however,  most  apparent  in  the 
history  of  the  drama.  At  the  beginning  of 
the  present  chapter,  we  have  drawn  attention 
to  the  fact  that  Romanticism,  with  its  in- 
difference to  form  and  rule,  was  not  favourable 
to  the  development  of  the  drama,  and  we 
pointed  out  that  the  chief  dramatic  poet  whose 
life  and  work  was  contemporary  with  the  first 
flush  of  German  Romanticism,  Heinrich  von 
Kleist,  belonged  to  no  Romantic  coterie.  The 
actual  Romantic  drama,  of  Tieck,  of  Bren- 
tano,  of  Werner  and  the  "  Fate  Dramatists," 
occupies  a  comparatively  subordinate  position 
in  the  literature  of  the  time.  Quantitatively 
speaking,  the  dramatic  production  of  North 
Germany  in  these  years,  in  so  far  as  it  aspired 
to  be  literature,  was  divided  between  anaemic 
imitations  of  Schiller's  dramas  and  an  endless 
succession  of  plays  on  themes  drawn  from 
national  history. 

The  golden  age  of  mediaeval  Romanticism, 
the  Hohenstaufen  epoch,  on  which  the  Roman- 
ticists had  concentrated  their  attention,  was 
to  the  dramatists  of  the  day  a  veritable 


174  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

gold  mine.  The  theatres  were  flooded  with 
Hohenstaufen  tragedies,  for  the  most  part  on 
the  model  of  Shakespeare's  historical  plays, 
and  occasionally  in  long  chronological  series. 
The  playwright,  Ernst  Raupach,  for  instance, 
wrote  no  less  than  ten  dramas  on  this  theme. 
Unfortunately,  however,  the  great  mass  of 
work  of  this  class  makes  little  claim  to 
higher  poetic  qualities.  Only  one  North 
German  poet  stands  out  in  this  era  as  a 
man  of  real  dramatic  gifts,  Christian  Grabbe  ; 
and  Grabbe,  too,  paid  his  tribute  to  the 
Hohenstaufen  mania.  His  best  works,  how- 
ever, are  the  finely  conceived  plays,  Faust  und 
Don  Juan  and  Napoleon,  oder  die  Hundert 
Tage  (Napoleon,  or  the  Hundred  Days),  the 
latter  one  of  the  very  best  of  all  Euro- 
pean dramas  on  this  theme.  Grabbe  fell 
between  two  stools,  and  that  even  more 
pitiably  than  his  predecessor  Kleist.  Forced 
by  the  circumstances  of  his  time  into  a 
Romantic  mould,  he  had  little  or  nothing  of 
the  Romanticist  about  him  ;  he  was  half  a 
"  Storm  and  Stress  "  poet  of  the  eighteenth- 
century  type,  and  half  a  very  modern  realist. 
His  own  life  was  unhappy,  and  he  died  early, 
a  victim  to  his  own  weakness  of  character. 
None  the  less,  Grabbe  was  a  dramatic  poet  of 


ROMANTICISM  175 

genius,  the  one  writer  of  his  time  in  the 
north  who  understood  the  essentials  of  dra- 
matic construction,  and  was  neither  misled 
by  Romantic  theories,  nor  tempted  to  fritter 
away  his  talent  in  artificial  imitation. 

Grabbe  was  an  exception  of  genius  in  an  era 
of  mediocrity  ;  the  real  history  of  the  German 
drama  between  the  death  of  Kleist  and  the 
appearance  of  Hebbel  is  to  be  sought  in 
Austria.  The  Austrians  have  always  pos- 
sessed that  most  necessary  of  all  conditions 
for  the  healthy  growth  of  the  drama,  a 
metropolitan  centre,  the  "  Kaiserstadt " 
Vienna.  Owing  partly  to  its  political  situa- 
tion and  partly  to  the  character  of  its  popula- 
tion, Vienna  was  marked  out  to  be  the  home  of 
the  German  national  theatre.  In  the  more 
stolid  North  Germany,  drama  and  theatre 
have  always  been,  so  to  speak,  a  purely 
literary  affair,  and  have  often  had  no  adequate 
root  in  the  soil ;  in  Vienna,  on  the  other  hand, 
the  popular  theatre  and  the  literary  drama 
go  hand  in  hand.  The  secret  of  strength  in 
a  national  drama  is  to  be  sought  in  the 
unliterary  undercurrent  of  popular  melodrama 
and  farce ;  and  Vienna  always  understood 
this,  even  back  in  the  unregenerate  days  of 
the  eighteenth  century,  when  her  literary 


176  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

dramatists,  such  as  Cornelius  von  Ayrenhoff, 
were  producing  cold,  artificial  tragedies  on 
the  Gottsched  pattern,  or,  somewhat  later, 
hardly  less  inviting  classic  tragedies,  such  as 
the  famous  Regulus  and  Coriolamis  of  Heinrich 
von  Collin.  Gradually,  however,  the  popular 
drama  encroached  on  this  pseudo-classic 
tragedy  and  the  widening  of  Romantic  tastes 
opened  the  national  theatre  to  the  opera  or 
musical  drama  and  the  popular  "  Posse," 
or  farce,  in  which  the  Viennese  temperament 
is  so  accurately  reflected.  Thus,  by  one  of  the 
ironies  of  literary  history,  we  find,  at  the 
beginning  of  the  Metternich  regime,  which, 
with  its  harsh  censorship  of  every  form  of 
literary  expression,  did  what  it  could  to  crush 
out  originality  of  form  or  ideas,  the  conditions 
for  dramatic  literature  in  a  peculiar  degree 
favourable  in  Austria. 

No  one  suffered  more  keenly  under  the 
adverse  political  conditions  in  Vienna  than 
Austria's  greatest  dramatist,  Franz  Grill- 
parzer.  Grillparzer  emerged  from  Roman- 
ticism ;  his  first  play,  Die  Ahnfrau  (The 
Ancestress),  produced  in  1817,  belongs  to 
that  group  of  ultra-Romantic  dramas  known 
as  the  "  Fate  tragedy,"  that  is  to  say,  a 
form  of  play  in  which  Romantic  fatalism  and 


ROMANTICISM  177 

crudely  sensational  stagecraft  were  blended 
to  form  a  somewhat  gruesome  modernisation 
of  the  Greek  tragedy.  But  Die  Ahnfrau 
was,  at  least,  the  best  of  its  class  ;  so  good, 
indeed,  that  Grillparzer's  admirers  have 
resented  its  association  with  the  class  at  all. 
Sappho,  Grillparzer's  next  play,  was  a  love- 
tragedy  of  the  classic  type.  One  naturally 
compares  it  with  Goethe's  Iphigenie,  but 
there  is  a  mellower,  more  Romantic  light  over 
Sappho,  less  of  the  older  poet's  serene  majesty 
of  utterance ;  the  classic  world  is  here  seen 
through  the  sentimentalising  spectacles  of  the 
new  school.  A  similar  adaption  of  a  classic 
theme  to  Romantic  ends  is  the  trilogy  of 
Das  goldene  Vlies  (The  Golden  Fleece),  of 
which  the  final  tragedy,  Medea,  stands  out  as 
one  of  Grillparzer's  chief  contributions  to  the 
drama  of  his  century.  This  is  the  ancient 
story  that  has  attracted  so  many  dramatic 
poets  throughout  the  ages,  told  again  with 
modern  Romantic  subjectivity,  and  treated 
with  a  grace  and  flexibility  unknown  in  the 
purely  classic  dramatists.  Grillparzer  here  fell 
under  the  spell  of  a  peculiar  strain  in  Austrian 
Romanticism,  its  predilection  for  the  Spanish 
poets.  The  first  Romantic  School  had  re- 
garded Calderon,  their  favourite  dramatist,  as 


178   THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

a  poet  of  even  greater  spiritual  possibilities 
than  Shakespeare,  and  they  had  borrowed 
largely  from  him;  but  it  was  left  to  the 
Austrian  poets  to  take  the  great  Spaniards 
— Lope  in  a  higher  degree  than  Calderon — 
to  their  hearts,  and  to  assimilate  the  Spanish 
spirit.  It  is  this  influence  which  gives 
Grillparzer's  figures,  and  more  especially 
his  women,  that  peculiar  Latin  grace  and 
suavity  which  are  unusual  qualities  in 
the  Romantic  drama  of  purely  Teutonic 
provenance.  In  Konig  Ottokars  Gluck  und 
Ende  (King  Ottokar's  Fortune  and  End), 
Grillparzer  gave  Austria  her  representative 
national  tragedy ;  and  in  Ein  treuer  Diener 
seines  Herrn  (A  Faithful  Servant  of  his 
Master),  one  hardly  less  powerful,  although 
by  reason  of  the  uncompromising  harshness 
of  its  theme,  less  popular.  Here,  again, 
Grillparzer  has  benefited  by  the  experiments 
of  his  Romantic  predecessors  with  Hohen- 
staufen  tragedies  and  other  forms  of  historical 
drama  ;  but  he  was  also  guided  by  a  finer, 
more  conscientious  realism  ;  and  in  place  of 
the  somewhat  tawdry  Romantic  stage-effects, 
in  which  the  North  German  theatre  revelled, 
the  finer  poetic  Romanticism  of  the  Spanish 
stage  asserts  itself.  The  failure  of  Grill- 


ROMANTICISM  179 

parzer's  one  and  only  comedy,  a  work  of 
extraordinary  power  and  originality,  WeW 
dem,  der  lugt  (Woe  to  Him  who  Lies),  was  fatal 
to  his  subsequent  career.  A  moody,  melan- 
choly man,  who  was  never  equal  to  life,  he 
went  through  it,  firmly  convinced  that  he  was 
one  of  its  failures.  The  political  tyranny — 
he  was  himself  a  Government  servant — lay 
heavy  on  him,  and  the  ten  years  which  find 
expression  in  the  bitter  renunciation  of  the 
lyrics  entitled  Tristia  ex  Ponto,  were  years 
of  very  real  suffering  to  him.  His  hold  upon 
his  art  was,  in  face  of  discouragement,  never 
a  very  firm  one,  and  when  Vienna  refused 
his  comedy,  he  turned  his  back  for  ever  on  the 
theatre,  and  spent  the  remaining  thirty-four 
years  of  his  life  in  retirement  from  the  literary 
world.  The  magnificent  poetic  sweep  of  a 
posthumous  play  like  Libitssa  shows  how  much 
the  German  public  lost  by  its  unfortunate 
attitude  to  Weft  dem,  der  lugt.  Grillparzer 
is  unquestionably  one  of  the  great  dramatic 
poets  of  his  century ;  less  virile  than  Kleist,  less 
subtle  than  Hebbel,  he  has  a  riper,  more  delicate- 
ly attuned  poetic  temperament  than  either  ; 
and  his  works,  with  their  pessimistic  strain  of 
self-distrust,  touch  chords  in  the  modern  man 
which  lie  beyond  the  range  of  the  older  drama. 


180  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

Grillparzer  by  no  means  stood  alone  in  the 
Austria  of  his  time.  With  its  great  Hofburg- 
theater,  its  many  popular  theatres,  and 
that  splendid  histrionic  talent,  in  which  the 
Austrian  people,  with  their  admixture  of  Latin 
and  Slavic  elements,  have  never  been  wanting, 
it  would  have  been  strange  had  the  theatre 
not  been  in  the  fullest  sense  alive  in  Vienna ; 
and  until  almost  the  end  of  the  nineteenth 
century,  when  the  leadership  passed  over  in 
some  respects,  but  not  all,  to  Berlin,  Vienna 
remained  the  theatrical  metropolis  of  the 
German-speaking  world.  The  popular  drama 
possessed  in  Ferdinand  Raimund  and  Johann 
Nestroy  playwrights  of  originality  and  wit ; 
Eduard  Bauernfeld,  again,  was  a  comedy- writer 
of  quiet,  polished  humour ;  and  Friedrich 
Halm  (the  pseudonym  of  E.  F.  J.  von  Miinch- 
Bellinghausen),  a  representative  of  the  shal- 
lower Romantic  drama  of  sentiment.  But 
all  this  varied  activity  only  makes  one  think, 
how  much  more  might  have  been  attained, 
had  not  the  drama  been  ground  down  in 
Austria  by  a  merciless  and  unintelligent 
censorship,  which  forced  the  great  talents  of 
the  time  to  have  recourse  to  inept  frivolity 
and  sentimentality.  The  realities  of  life 
necessarily  disappeared  from  a  theatre,  which 


ROMANTICISM  181 

could  not  even  tolerate  the  classic  drama  of 
Germany  uncensored  by  the  police. 

Unfavourable  as  the  Romantic  movement 
was  to  the  evolution  or  steady  development 
of  any  one  distinctive  type  of  play,  it  at  least 
had  an  exceedingly  stimulating  effect  on 
the  drama  in  general  and  on  the  theatre. 
The  age  was  one  of  constant  and  interesting 
experimentation ;  an  age  which,  in  spite  of 
its  comparatively  few  outstanding  monuments 
of  dramatic  poetry,  contributed  more  to  the 
moulding  of  the  modern  drama  than  any  other. 
This  is  its  real  significance  ;  its  stage  experi- 
ments, and  not  the  untheatrical  Romantic 
drama,  as  cultivated  by  the  Tiecks  and  Bren- 
tanos  of  the  North,  are  what  make  the 
period  of  German  Romanticism  so  interesting  a 
chapter  in  the  history  of  the  European  drama. 

Before  leaving  the  great  movement  which 
dominated  the  spiritual  life  in  Germany  in 
the  first  third  of  the  nineteenth  century, 
we  have  to  consider  two  writers,  who  are 
usually  looked  upon  as  the  last  outposts 
of  Romanticism,  namely,  Karl  Immermann 
and  August  von  Platen-Hallermunde.  The 
first  of  these  was  a  voluminous  writer,  a 
clear-headed,  not  very  inspired  poet  and 
critic,  who  was  abreast  of  every  phase  in  the 


182   THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

intellectual  movement ;  he  realised  in  all  his 
writings  the  need  of  coming  to  clearness  with 
himself  as  to  the  inner  meaning  of  his  time  ; 
his  whole  work,  indeed,  is  a  kind  of  unconscious 
criticism  of  Romanticism.  As  a  dramatist, 
he  tried  his  hand  methodically  at  every 
form  of  drama  which  his  predecessors  had 
cultivated;  he  wrote  historical  tragedies  and 
"  fate  tragedies,"  imitated  Shakespeare  and 
Calderon  ;  and  spent  a  very  instructive  and 
helpful  year  directing  special  performances 
in  the  Diisseldorf  theatre,  which  sum  up,  as 
it  were,  the  technical  achievement  of  the 
Romantic  movement  with  regard  to  the  stage. 
As  a  novelist,  his  position  is  even  clearer. 
Here  he  reflected  the  passing  of  the  movement 
into  which  he  had  been  born,  and  his  chief 
novel,  Die  Epigonen  (The  Epigoni),  is  alike 
the  last  of  the  purely  Romantic  novels  and 
the  first  of  the  new  group  of  "  fiction  with  a 
purpose  "  that  took  its  place.  Immermann 
realised  that  he  belonged  to  a  passing  age, 
and  this  knowledge  lay  heavy  on  him,  and 
paralysed  his  genius. 

Platen's  case  was  somewhat  different.  He 
was  by  no  means  so  completely  immerged  in 
the  movement  of  his  time  ;  a  sharp-witted, 
facile  writer,  he  not  merely  stood  aloof  from 


ROMANTICISM  188 

the  decadent  Romanticism,  but  satirised  it 
and  with  a  power  which  only  one  of  his 
contemporaries,  namely,  Heine,  could  equal. 
He  fled  from  Romanticism,  fled  from  Germany, 
to  find  a  more  congenial  world  for  his  classic 
soul,  which  abhorred  Romantic  excesses 
above  all  things,  in  Italy ;  and  here, 
comparatively  early  in  life,  he  died.  In  spite 
of  Platen's  apparent  antagonism  to  Roman- 
ticism, he  could  no  more  get  away  from  it  than 
could  Heine  ;  his  whole  art,  his  sympathies 
and  antipathies,  his  flight  to  Italy,  were, 
after  all,  characteristic  of  certain  phases  of  the 
Romantic  movement,  and  his  literary  work 
belongs  essentially  to  that  movement.  The 
real  element  of  antagonism  was  the  political 
realism  that  broke  over  Germany  when  the 
Romantic  movement  was  nearing  its  close  ; 
and  with  this  Platen,  unlike  Heine,  could 
have  no  sympathy.  Platen  is  a  somewhat 
inaccessible  poet,  who,  unless  in  his  remark- 
ably candid  diaries,  by  no  means  wore  his 
heart  on  his  sleeve.  To  him  poetry  was  an 
art,  not  a  confession ;  subjective  truth  was 
less  important  in  his  eyes  than  exquisite 
polish  and  perfect  workmanship  ;  and  Goethe 
could  say  that  the  one  thing  wanting  in 
him  was  love.  There  are  no  warm  emotions 


184     THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

in  Platen's  poetry  ;  but  he  has  given  Germany 
her  most  perfectly  moulded  verses ;  his 
Sonnets,  especially  that  wonderful  cycle, 
Sonette  aus  Venedig  (Sonnets  from  Venice), 
form  the  highwater  mark  of  German  formal 
poetry  in  the  nineteenth  century. 

What  were  the  causes  that  led  to  the 
downfall  of  Romanticism  in  Germany  ?  Did 
it,  so  to  speak,  live  its  life  to  an  end  and  die  a 
natural  death  ?  We  hardly  think  so.  Certain 
phases  came  and  went ;  but  the  Proteus-forms 
of  the  Romantic  mood  were  not  easily  de- 
stroyed ;  all  through  the  next  period  we  find 
manifestations  of  their  continued  vitality ; 
and,  when  the  anti-Romantic  mood  waned, 
Romanticism  returned  again  with  something 
of  its  pristine  force.  The  causes  which  led 
to  its  temporal  eclipse  are  worth  inquiring 
into.  These  seem  to  have  been  in  the 
main  twofold  :  philosophical  and  intellectual 
on  the  one  side,  and  social  and  political  on  the 
other.  Two  great  facts  stand  out  in  the  first 
category ;  the  passing  of  the  individualistic 
philosophy  of  Fichte  and  Schelling — the  latter 
with  its  mystic  spiritualisation  of  nature,  being 
the  real  philosophy  of  Romanticism — and  the 
supersession  of  that  philosophy  by  a  mightier 
force  than  either,  the  philosophy  of  Hegel. 


ROMANTICISM  185 

Hegelianism,  which  itself  was  Romantic 
enough  in  its  origins,  became,  as  it  grew  in 
strength,  the  chief  enemy  of  the  Romantic 
mood.  It  entangled  the  individualism  of 
Romanticism  in  a  web  of  generalisations, 
of  sociological  theories,  and  petrifying  dogmas 
of  historical  evolution,  which  gradually,  but 
none  the  less  surely,  destroyed  its  life. 
The  one  great  antidote  which  the  time 
provided,  the  pessimism  of  Schopenhauer,  was 
powerless  to  stay  the  triumphant  advance  of 
Hegelianism ;  Schopenhauer's  day  had  not 
yet  come.  The  Hegelian  philosophy,  more- 
over, proved  itseL  extremely  adaptable  to 
the  changing  horizons  of  the  time ;  its 
metamorphoses,  as  enunciated  by  the  thinkers 
of  the  so-caled  Hegelian  "  right  "  and  the 
Hegelian  "  left,"  made  it  possible  to  retain 
Hegel's  most  dissentient  disciples  within  the 
fold.  Hegel  had  thus  all  the  intellectual  life  of 
Germany  in  his  ban  ;  its  poetry  as  well  as  its 
theology.  And  so  it  remained,  until  his 
power  was  shaken  by  the  rise  of  an 
unmetaphysical  positivism  about  the  middle 
of  the  century.  Hegelianism  could  keep  the 
literary  impulse  in  check,  but  it  had  not 
reckoned  with  the  advance  of  scientific 
discovery;  and  the  the  growing  interest  in 


186  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

science  was,  as  we  shall  see,  the  real 
enemy,  not  merely  of  Hegelianism,  but  of 
Romanticism  itself. 

The  social  and  political  development  was 
equally  unfavourable  to  the  movement.  In 
fact,  it  is  in  its  attitude  to  politics,  if  anywhere, 
that  the  bankruptcy  of  Romanticism  is  to  be 
seen.  In  the  early  days,  the  Romanticists 
had  been  associated  with  a  retrograde  move- 
ment in  politics  ;  one  might  say  quite  frankly 
that  the  hopes  of  Germany  after  1813  were 
shipwrecked  on  the  Romantic,  unpolitical 
passivity  of  the  German  educated  classes. 
The  Karlsruhe  Resolutions,  the  regime  of 
Metternich  himself,  were  emphatically  mani- 
festations of  the  Romantic  spirit,  helpless  to 
grapple  with  political  questions  of  any  kind, 
and  the  apologists  of  Metternich  were  thinkers 
who  had,  so  to  speak,  taken  their  degree  in 
the  Romantic  School.  Socially  speaking,  the 
movement  was  still  less  able  to  cope  with  the 
new  conditions.  The  Romantic  generation 
in  Germany  were  like  children  when  con- 
fronted by  the  development  of  industry 
consequent  on  the  invention  of  labour-saving 
machinery  ;  and  they  faced  the  new  problems 
with  far  less  wisdom  than  Goethe  had  done 
in  his  socialistic  Wanderjahre.  Thus,  in  the 


ROMANTICISM  187 

confusion  and  ever-increasing  muddle,  the 
young  German  spirits  of  the  thirties  threw 
Romanticism  overboard  and  looked  to  France 
for  their  salvation.  From  France  came  the 
final  blow  before  which  Romanticism  went 
down. 


CHAPTER   VI 

THE   POST-ROMANTIC   EPOCH 

THE  end  of  the  long  reign  of  Romanticism 
in  German  poetry  is,  as  we  have  seen,  better 
marked  by  the  July  Revolution  in  Paris  in 
1830  than  by  the  death  of  Goethe,  if  only 
because  that  Revolution  provided  the  imme- 
diate inspiration  of  the  new  literary  school  of 
"  Young  Germany."  We  doubt  if  the  modern 
reader  will  turn  with  as  much  interest  to  the 
"  Young  German  "  literature  as  to  the  older 
Romantic  poetry  ;  it  is  not  that  we  are,  in 
our  literary  tastes,  more  romantically  in- 
clined to-day  than  a  generation  ago,  but  rather 
that  we  are  less  willing  to  have  our  poetry 
mixed  up  with  politics.  At  the  best,  problems 
of  statecraft,  and  the  type  of  mind  they 
demand,  are  unfavourable  to  the  production  or 
enjoyment  of  pure  literature,  and  once  the 
immediate  objects  of  a  political  movement 
are  forgotten,  it  is  doubly  difficult  to  grow 
warm  over  a  literature  to  which  these  objects 

188 


THE    POST-ROMANTIC   EPOCH    189 

were  once  the  end-all  and  be-all.  Besides,  the 
"  Young  German  "  era  is  still  too  near  to  us. 
It  is  the  fate  of  an  epoch  in  literary,  if  not 
so  frequently  in  political,  history,  to  pass  first 
through  a  period  in  which  it  appears  unin- 
teresting and  even  repellent,  the  immediately 
following  generation  being,  as  it  were,  glad 
to  have  got  beyond  it  ;  then  comes  a 
stage  when  it  seems  merely  old-fashioned  ; 
and  only  later  do  we  make  the  discovery 
that  it  has  receded  far  enough  to  begin  to  be 
attractive  again.  As  far  as  "  Young  Ger- 
many "  is  concerned,  we  doubt  if  that  school 
has  yet  emerged  from  the  second  or  old- 
fashioned  stage ;  only  within  very  recent 
years,  at  least,  have  there  been  signs  of 
a  revival  of  interest  in  it  in  Germany. 

But  there  is  one  redeeming  constituent 
of  "  Young  Germany,"  and  one  which  non- 
German  readers  appreciate  even  more  readily 
than  the  Germans  themselves,  that  is  Heine. 
Heinrich  Heine  was  a  "  Young  German," 
although  a  "  Young  German "  who  could 
never  belie  the  fact  that  his  cradle  had  stood 
in  the  old  Romantic  fairyland.  Round  no 
poet  of  modern  Europe  has  controversy 
waged  so  fiercely,  no  poet  has  been  so  warmly 
defended,  none  so  bitterly  attacked  as  he. 


190  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

And  even  yet,  controversy  has  not  ceased  to 
rage.  To  deny  the  quality  of  greatness  to 
Heine  is  absurd,  and  mainly  due  to  antisemitic 
prejudice ;  Heine  is  a  great  lyric  poet,  and 
what  is  more,  one  of  the  most  original  lyric 
poets  of  modern  literature.  But,  at  the  same 
time,  there  is  room  for  a  certain  resentment 
when  we  consider  the  form  which,  especially 
in  England,  the  admiration  of  Heine  has 
taken ;  our  critics  have  made  claims  for 
Heine  which  are  difficult  to  reconcile  with  the 
fact  that  our  own  greatest  exemplars  of  lyric 
genius  were  far  from  being  cast  in  Heine's 
mould ;  we  have  looked  to  Heine  as  the 
one  and  only  modern  German  poet,  have 
refused  to  regard  as  serious  blemishes  on  his 
genius,  and,  what  hurts  Heine's  countrymen 
still  more,  have  persisted  in  allowing  Heine  to 
blind  us  to  the  half-dozen  other  supremely 
great  singers  of  modern  Germany. 

Born  in  1797,  on  the  eve  of  the  birth  of  the 
first  Romantic  School,  Heine  passed  in  his 
youth  through  the  entire  gamut  of  Romantic 
moods ;  but  there  were  certain  factors  in 
Heine's  case  which  conspired  against  the 
unlimited  domination  of  Romanticism.  The 
fact  that  he  was  of  Jewish  family  gave  him, 
at  the  outset,  a  cosmopolitan  stamp  and  cos- 


THE   POST-ROMANTIC  EPOCH    191 

mopolitan  interests,  and  these  counteracted 
the  aggressive  Germanism  of  an  undiluted 
Romanticism ;  it  also  made  for  cosmopoli- 
tanism that  Diisseldorf,  Heine's  birthplace, 
had  fallen  more  completely  under  French 
domination  and  had  accepted  Napoleon  less 
unwillingly  than  the  more  eastern  parts  of 
Germany.  The  imaginative  appeal  of  the  sea, 
which  stamped  itself  indelibly  on  his  poetic 
genius  in  early  days,  again,  is  so  sparingly 
represented  in  the  Romantic  movement — • 
we  have  noticed  it  only  in  Wilhelm  Mtiller — 
that  that  in  itself  implied  the  introduction  of 
a  new  note  into  the  Romantic  lyric.  But  per- 
haps the  most  disturbing  feature  of  all  in 
Heine's  genius  is  that  he  combined  with 
the  most  complete  abandonment  to  Roman- 
ticism, that  intensely  matter-of-fact,  realistic 
outlook  of  life  which  is  characteristic  of  his 
race.  No  other  writer  of  this  time  showed 
such  extraordinary  disparity  in  the  two  sides 
of  his  nature.  Even  in  Hoffmann's  case, 
there  was  a  more  complete  blending  of  the 
supernatural  elements  in  his  stories  with 
the  concrete  realism  of  his  treatment  of  them, 
than  there  is  of  the  airy  fancies  of  Romantic 
convention  with  the  outspoken  realism  of 
Heine's  withering  irony  and  self-criticism. 


192   THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

Irony,  it  will  be  remembered,  was  a  constant 
feature  in  the  poetic  art  of  the  Roman- 
ticists, but  while  to  them  it  was  merely  a 
weapon  in  their  poetic  armoury,  which  they 
might  use  or  not  as  the  mood  took  them,  to 
Heine  it  was  a  grimly  negative,  corroding 
force  that  ate  into  the  soul  of  the  unhappy 
poet  himself. 

The  Buck  der  Lieder  (Book  of  Songs)  is 
the  most  original,  as  it  was  the  most  popular 
German  song-book  of  its  century  ;  published 
in  1827,  it  is  a  collection  of  all  the  lyric  poetry 
— some  of  it  had  already  been  published  before 
without  attracting  much  notice — which  Heine 
had  written  up  to  that  date.  The  basis  of 
this  poetry  is  essentially  Romantic  ;  but  the 
Romantic  imagery  and  technique  form  rather 
an  outer  framework  than  an  essential  con- 
stituent ;  the  very  manner  in  which  Heine 
treats  the  nightingales  and  roses  and  violets 
of  the  conventional  nature  of  German 
Romanticism,  reminds  us  at  times  of  how 
the  thirteenth-century  Minnesingers  employed 
the  stock  images  of  the  Minnesang ;  this 
is  the  least  original  and  the  most  tradi- 
tionary aspect  of  his  poetry,  although,  as  is 
usually  the  case,  the  aspect  which  made  the 
most  immediate  popular  appeal.  Heine's 


THE    POST-ROMANTIC   EPOCH    193 

greatness  lies  in  his  manner,  not  his  matter ; 
in  the  use  to  which  he  puts  these  conventions  ; 
in  the  ironic  realism  he  flashes  on  them ;  in 
his  skill  in  adapting  them  to  the  expression  of 
his  own  personal  emotions.  Not  but  what  he 
saw  Nature  with  his  own  eyes — and  this  is 
especially  true  of  the  North  Sea  lyrics ;  but 
the  seeing  of  nature  is  to  him  a  less  sincere  thing 
than  it  was  to  purely  Romantic  singers  like 
Eichendorff.  The  accusation  of  insincerity  is 
one  of  the  most  frequent  that  is  brought 
against  Heine  ;  and  with  a  certain  justice. 
His  nature-poetry  is  a  distinct  adaptation, 
even  falsification  of  nature  to  suit  his  peculiar 
purpose ;  there  is  more  personal  emotion 
in  it  than  truth  of  perception.  But  in  that 
very  emotion,  and  in  the  acrid  pessimism  of 
his  self-irony,  there  is  surely  a  great  and 
unquestionable  sincerity.  It  may  not  be  the 
kind  of  sincerity  which  one  looks  for  in  a 
lyric  poet ;  but  it  is  sincerity  all  the  same. 
Heine  thinks  nothing  of  spoiling,  as  his  would- 
be  admirers  like  to  say,  the  purest  lyric  gem 
with  an  outburst  of  mockery  or  ribaldry  that 
wounds  the  sensitive  reader ;  and  in  this 
mockery  there  is  an  expression  of  the  poet's 
personality  which  could  not  have  been  at- 
tained in  a  lyric  of  a  more  conventional  type. 


194   THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

Moreover,  the  really  original  and  new  elements 
in  Heine's  poetry  lie  just  in  this  deviation  from 
the  poetic  tradition.  On  the  other  hand,  it 
is  only  fair  to  consider  the  standpoint  that 
Heine's  lyric  mingles  but  indifferently  with  the 
great  stream  of  national  German  lyric  poetry 
in  which  the  most  subtle  artistic  instincts 
of  the  nation  have  found  expression.  In  this 
respect,  Heine's  German  critics  are  justified 
in  their  reproach  that  he  is  not  a  national 
poet  in  the  highest  sense  of  the  word  ;  and  it 
may  be  regarded  rather  as  a  confirmation  of 
that  criticism  than  a  refutation,  that,  of 
all  the  German  poets  of  his  century,  Heine 
should  be  the  one  who  has  awakened  most 
interest  among  nations  other  than  his  own. 

In  the  midst  of  the  unhappiness  and  dis- 
traughtness  which  are  reflected  in  his  early 
lyrics,  a  ray  of  light  fell  on  Heine.  The  July 
Revolution  broke  over  France  ;  and  for  a  time, 
at  least,  he  saw  in  France  the  new  Jerusalem, 
the  one  place  of  refuge  amidst  the  political 
and  intellectual  bankruptcy  of  the  age.  He 
joined  hands  with  the  young  political  writers 
of  the  day,  and,  like  them,  he,  too,  had  had  his 
brushes  with  the  censorship,  the  common 
enemy.  He  became  a  journalist  in  the  service 
of  the  new  political  ideal,  and  made  his  home 


THE   POST-ROMANTIC   EPOCH    195 

in  Paris.  It  is  at  this  point  that  Heine  becomes 
an  active  member  of  the  school  of  "  Young 
Germany."  The  great  bulk  of  Heine's  prose 
writings  is  of  the  nature  of  journalism  ;  it 
was  the  only  means  which  an  exiled  German 
poet  had  of  keeping  the  wolf  from  the  door ; 
and  he  wrote  on  everything  that  he  could  turn 
his  hand  to,  on  Paris  daily  events,  on  the 
Salon,  the  theatres.  But  all  he  did  he  did 
supremely  well ;  Heine  was  no  less  brilliant 
a  journalist  than  he  was  great  as  a  lyric  poet. 
His  style  is  crisp  and  attractive  ;  in  his  hands, 
German  prose  has  become  shorn  of  the  long- 
winded  heaviness  that  had  been  handed  down 
as  a  legacy  from  the  classic  age.  The  lightness 
and  vivacity  of  the  Gallic  spirit  passed  over 
into  Heine's  blood.  He  had,  however,  already 
made  his  mark  as  a  prose  writer  before  he 
went  to  France,  before  even  the  Buck  der 
Liedcr  had  taken  Germany  by  storm.  Die 
Harzreise  (The  Journey  in  the  Harz),  that 
delightful  "  sentimental  "  journey,  with  which 
he  opened  his  inimitable  Reisenovellen  (Travel 
Novels)  in  1826,  is  no  less  important  a  land- 
mark in  the  evolution  of  German  literature 
than  the  Buck  der  Lieder  itself.  In  later 
years,  he  also  wrote  on  more  serious  subjects, 
on  German  philosophy,  on  the  Romantic 


196  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

School,  on  his  quondam  friend  Ludwig  Borne. 
Meanwhile  his  lyric  art  was  gaining  in 
strength ;  it  threw  off  its  swathings  of 
conventional  Romanticism,  and  rose,  in  the 
wonderful  collection  of  songs  that  bears  the 
title  Romanccro,  to  heights  it  had  never 
touched  before  ;  while  in  the  ruthless  criticism 
of  the  poem  Deutschland  (Germany)  his  satire 
took  on  Aristophanic  colours  which  his 
countrymen  have  never  forgotten.  The  chief 
work  of  Heine's  later  period  is  Atta  Troll, 
a  half-lyric  and  half-epic,  half-romantic  and 
half-satiric  romance,  which  in  originality  of 
conception  had  not  had  its  like  in  European 
literature  since  the  death  of  Byron.  After 
years  of  tragic  condemnation  to  a  mattress- 
grave,  Heine  died  in  Paris  in  1856. 

Less  need  be  said  of  the  other  members  of 
the  "  Young  German  "  coterie.  Ludwig  Borne, 
like  Heine  a  Jew,  was  more  completely 
immersed  than  he  in  the  stream  of  political 
journalism  ;  and  he  lives  now  only  as  one 
of  the  brilliant  radical  journalists  of  those 
days,  when  Paris  was  looked  to  as  the 
salvation  of  Europe,  the  deliverer  from  her 
political  fetters.  His  Briefe  aus  Paris  (Letters 
from  Paris)  are  a  document  of  the  first 
importance  in  the  intellectual  movement  of 


THE    POST-ROMANTIC   EPOCH    197 

the  time.  Heinrich  Laube,  a  less  conspicuous 
talent  in  the  purely  literary  field,  laboured  all 
his  life  long  to  turn  the  stream  of  French 
culture  and  literature  into  German  lands ; 
and  he  was  largely  instrumental  in  bringing 
the  German  theatre  under  the  influence  of 
the  modern  French  social  drama.  His  most 
conspicuous  success  was  won  as  director  of 
the  "  Burgtheater  "  in  Vienna,  and  later  of  the 
"  Stadttheater  "  in  Leipzig  ;  here  he  displayed 
gifts  of  a  high  order ;  compared  with  these, 
his  talent  for  imaginative  literature  assumes 
very  secondary  importance. 

The  most  conspicuous  man  of  letters  pure 
and  simple  of  the  Young  German  movement 
was  Karl  Gutzkow.  He,  too,  was  a  radical 
in  his  political  views,  and  made  himself  offen- 
sive to  those  in  authority.  In  his  earlier 
period  he  passed  through  the  inevitable  phase 
of  "  Storm  and  Stress,"  and  in  books  like 
Watty  die  Zweiflerin  (Wally  the  Sceptic) 
shocked  and  dismayed  the  religious  and  moral 
sense  of  his  contemporaries.  But  politics  are 
less  in  evidence  in  his  literary  work  than  in 
that  of  the  other  members  of  the  group  ;  his 
strength  lay  in  novel  and  drama.  His  plays 
are  not  masterpieces  ;  the  more  serious  ones, 
such  as  the  iambic  philosophical  tragedy  of 


198   THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

Uriel  Acosta,  seem  strangely  dull  productions 
now,  but  he  was  particularly  successful  with 
intrigue-comedies  of  the  type  popularised  on 
the  European  stage  by  Scribe.  Amongst  the 
purveyors  of  the  daily  fare  of  the  theatre  Gutz- 
kow  certainly  deserves  an  honourable  place.  In 
the  novel  he  struck  a  more  significant  note  : 
here  he  is  a  genuine  pioneer.  One  might 
say  that  the  new  type  of  social  fiction  fore- 
shadowed by  Immermann's  Epigonen,  is, 
to  some  extent,  realised  in  Gutzkow's  Hitter 
vom  Geist  (Knights  of  the  Spirit).  The  old 
Romantic  subjectivity  and  dolce  far  niente 
have  disappeared  here  before  an  active  interest 
in  social  problems  ;  the  object  of  the  German 
novelist  is  no  longer  to  write  the  intimate 
history  of  a  single  hero,  but  to  make  a 
period  live  again  before  his  audience  in  all 
its  manifold  variety.  Unfortunately,  Gutz- 
kow's talent  was  not  strong  enough  to  carry 
out  his  admirable  ideals  in  fiction  ;  his  later 
years  show  a  declining  power  ;  or  perhaps  it 
may  only  have  been  that  the  new  type  of 
novel  which  he  created,  passed  on  into  younger 
hands. 

Of  the  lesser  satellites  of  this  School, 
little  need  be  said  ;  the  role  they  played, 
which  seemed  important  enough  in  their  day, 


THE    POST-ROMANTIC    EPOCH    199 

proved  from  the  standpoint  of  later  genera- 
tions a  very  transient  affair.  Like  so  many 
new  movements — like,  one  might  even  say, 
the  first  Romantic  School  before  it — the 
function  of  "  Young  Germany  "  was  to  awaken 
and  stimulate  ;  the  new  lines  it  initiated  were 
carried  to  fruitful  results  by  successors  who 
repudiated  all  connection  with  the  school. 
So  it  was  with  the  novel,  and  in  even  a  higher 
degree  with  the  drama.  But  before  turning 
to  such  developments,  we  must  look  at  a  group 
of  writers  who  were  intimately  associated  with 
the  "  Young  Germans,"  the  political  poets  who 
assumed  an  importance  out  of  all  proportion 
to  their  actual  gifts,  in  the  years  which  led  up 
to  the  mid-century  Revolution  of  1848. 

Political  literature,  above  all,  political 
poetry,  has  never  flourished  in  Germany  ;  the 
introduction  of  political  ideas  into  German 
literature  has  invariably  meant  a  depreciation 
of  the  literary  currency ;  the  patriotic  lyric  has 
been  more  often  blustering  and  blatant  than 
poetically  inspired.  So  it  was  in  1841  when 
politics  invaded  the  "  Young  German  "  lyric ; 
up  to  that  date  the  "  Young  Germans  "  had, 
with  the  exception  of  semi-Romantic  poets 
like  Heine,  produced  little  poetry  of  any 
kind.  Now,  for  reasons  apparently  quite 


200  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

unassociated  with  any  particular  political 
event,  Germany  suddenly  resounded  with 
patriotic  outbursts  of  song ;  the  Rhine  was 
celebrated  as  the  symbol  of  German  greatness, 
the  national  river  par  excellence.  The  strain 
was  taken  up  by  the  young  revolutionary, 
Georg  Herwegh,  in  his  Lieder  eines  Leben- 
digen.  Ferdinand  Freiligrath,  who  had  just 
been  making  his  way  into  prominence  with 
poetry  in  the  earlier  Romantic  style,  modified 
by  a  highly-coloured  orientalism  borrowed 
from  the  French  Romanticists,  was  convinced 
by  Herwegh  that  all  this  was  the  merest 
trifling ;  and  he,  too,  placed  his  genius 
at  the  service  of  the  political  ideas.  And 
in  the  train  of  these  two  men,  who  no  doubt 
were  the  most  skilled  of  the  group  in  the 
handling  of  the  revolutionary  poetry,  came  a 
whole  crowd  of  poets.  Many,  like  Franz 
Dingelstedt,  for  a  time  only  revolutionists, 
others,  like  Hoffmann  von  Fallersleben  and 
Emanual  Geibel,  poets  whose  peculiar  genius 
lay  rather  in  more  legitimate  and  traditional 
fields  of  lyric  expression  ;  but,  for  the  time, 
all  efforts  were  directed  to  the  achievement 
of  one  political,  although  somewhat  vaguely 
formulated,  ideal.  It  is  difficult  to  trace 
in.  public  events  the  background  of  this 


THE    POST-ROMANTIC   EPOCH    201 

literary  unrest ;  outwardly,  indeed,  it  would 
hardly  seem  as  if  there  was  much  ground  for 
it  at  all.  Since  1840  a  Romanticist,  Friedrich 
Wilhelm  IV.,  had  sat  on  "  the  throne  of  the 
Caesars  "  ;  and  the  political  conditions  were  no 
more  galling  in  the  "Polizeistaat"  of  the  middle 
of  the  century  than  they  had  been  before  1841. 
Thus  much  of  the  feeling  was  no  doubt  a 
reflection  of  the  unstable  conditions  which 
reigned  in  France  between  1830  and  1848. 
So  unconscious,  indeed,  was  the  German 
political  lyric  of  any  concrete,  political  end, 
that  it  seemed  to  rise  and  fall  quite  independ- 
ently of  political  movements.  The  French 
Revolution  of  1848  took  the  German  poets  by 
surprise,  after  they  had  been  for  years  expend- 
ing their  energy  in  beating  the  air.  It  sud- 
denly dawned  on  them  that  here  was  a  possible 
solution  to  all  their  troubles.  They  concen- 
trated their  energies  and  greeted  the  March 
risings  with  elation  ;  for  a  time  it  seemed 
likely  that  Germany  would  be  granted 
constitutional  government.  When  the  Revo- 
lution failed  and,  as  far  as  Germany  was  con- 
cerned, failed  dismally,  the  whole  political 
movement,  as  reflected  in  lyric  poetry,  was 
snuffed  out  as  suddenly  as  it  had  been  fanned 
into  flame. 


202   THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

With  Freiligrath,  Geibel  was  the  only  poet 
of  the  group  who  can  be  regarded  as,  in  the 
higher  sense,  inspired  ;  and  Geibel  was  only 
for  a  brief  space  associated  with  the  revolu- 
tionaries. He  came  at  the  end  of  the  revolt, 
as  Herwegh  had  initiated  it ;  and  he  recon- 
ciled it  as  best  he  could  with  the  political 
conditions  that  supervened.  His  own  strength 
as  a  lyric  poet  lay  rather  in  the  revival  of  purely 
Romantic  strains  in  the  lyric,  than  in  striking 
any  new  note  ;  but  he  had  a  rare  sense  of 
music,  and  a  power  of  coining  phrases  that 
cling  to  one's  memory.  Geibel  was  the  chief 
lyric  force  in  German  literature  in  the  post- 
revolutionary  epoch,  and  his  very  lack  of 
originality  was  expressive  of  that  time.  He 
was  a  sponsor  of  the  Munich  group  of  writers 
to  whom  we  have  to  turn  immediately,  and 
one  of  the  few  men  of  poetic  genius  who, 
in  1870  and  1871,  greeted  Germany's  triumphs 
with  poetry  that  is  still  remembered. 

Another  and  less  negative  aspect  of  the 
political  lyric  is  its  stimulating  and  inspiring 
effeet  on  contemporary  poetry  generally  ;  it, 
no  doubt,  helped  to  break  the  oppressively 
powerful  Romantic  tradition,  and  to  clear  the 
way  for  fresh  initiative.  Perhaps  in  a  more 
hopeful  age  it  might  have  done  this  more 


THE    POST-ROMANTIC    EPOCH    203 

effectually ;  but  its  influence  was  none  the 
less  widespread.  It  is  to  be  seen  in  that 
extraordinarily  promising  young  genius, 
Moritz  von  Strachwitz,  who  was  cut  off  at 
the  age  of  twenty-three  ;  it  is  to  be  seen  in 
the  desentimentalised  lyric,  with  its  manlier 
tone,  of  men  like  Gottfried  Keller  and  Fried- 
rich  Hebbel,  and  in  the  vigorous  poetry  of 
Germany's  greatest  poetess,  Annette  von 
Droste-Hiilshoff.  This  writer's  early  narrative 
poetry  goes  back  to  the  days  of  Romantic 
ascendancy,  but  she  was  then  more  influenced 
by  Byron  than  by  German  models  ;  and  in 
her  lyric  and  religious  poetry  there  is  an  acer- 
bity of  tone  which  is  poles  asunder  from  the 
mellifluousness  of  the  Romanticists.  The  tonic 
of  realism  and  the  active  standpoint  with 
regard  to  political  and  social  movements,  have 
left  their  imprint  on  this  lonely,  retiring  West- 
phalian  singer,  who  struck  the  most  original 
note  of  all  in  the  poetry  of  this  unoriginal 
time. 

The  triumph  of  the  "  Young  German " 
idea  is,  however,  most  clearly  seen,  as  was 
only  natural,  in  the  prose  fiction  before  and 
after  the  middle  of  the  century.  A  new  period 
of  brilliancy  opened  for  the  novel,  a  form  of 
literature  which  had  played  a  quite  subor- 


204   THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

dinate  role  in  German  classicism,  and  by  no 
means  a  prominent  one  in  Romanticism.  The 
number  of  masterpieces  of  the  first  rank  which 
we  owe  to  the  mid-century  novelists  may  not 
be  great ;  but  their  activity  was  extra- 
ordinarily varied,  and  provided  a  veritable 
mirror  of  the  social  life  of  the  period.  This 
fiction  falls  into  two  main  groups,  the  novel 
of  ideas  and  the  novel  of  the  province.  At  the 
head  of  the  first  group  stands  Gutzkow  with 
his  Ritter  vom  Geiste,  at  the  head  of  the 
second,  Immermann  with  the  first  modern 
*'  Novelle,"  or  short  story,  of  peasant-life, 
Der  Oberhof. 

Gutzkow' s  immediate  successor  was  Fried- 
rich  Spielhagen.  In  his  first  long  novel, 
Gutzkow  had  expressed  the  unrest  and 
discontent  of  the  age  that  led  up  to  the  final 
explosion  of  1848  ;  Friedrich  Spielhagen,  in 
his  Problematische  Naturen,  depicted,  one 
might  say,  the  actual  generation  that  took 
part  in  that  Revolution ;  he  analysed  the 
ideas  that  lay  behind  it,  and  gave  an  unforget- 
table picture  of  the  vague  forces  of  unrest 
and  tantalising  indecision — an  indecision  that 
wrung  from  Freiligrath  his  famous  poem, 
Deutschland  ist  Hamlet — which  were  respons- 
ible for  the  abortive  rising  of  1848.  Spielhagen 


THE    POST-ROMANTIC    EPOCH    205 

lived  down  into  our  own  time — he  died  in 
1911 — but  his  important  work  belongs  to 
the  sixties  and  early  seventies  of  last  century. 
His  fiction  has  all  the  faults  of  unwieldy 
formlessness  which  clung  to  German  and 
also  in  part  to  English  fiction  before  the 
influence  of  France  made  itself  felt  in  this 
domain ;  its  sentiment  is  nowadays  old- 
fashioned  and  unacceptable ;  but  it  was 
at  least  the  sentiment  of  its  time.  The 
novel  already  mentioned  was  followed  by 
Hammer  und  Amboss  (Hammer  and  Anvil) 
and  In  Reih'  und  Glied  (In  Rank  and  File), 
all  in  the  best  sense  representative  books. 
With  Sturmflut  (Storm  Tide),  published  in 
1876,  a  novel  that  is  often  claimed  as  Spiel- 
hagen's  best,  he  seems  to  us  to  have  passed 
beyond  the  period  in  which  he  was  at  home ; 
story  and  ideas  no  longer  move  together  in 
perfect  harmony. 

A  less  militant  novelist  of  this  age,  but 
one  who  made  a  stronger  appeal  to  those  who 
seek  literary  art  in  the  novel,  was  Gustav 
Freytag.  Freytag's  greatest  novel,  Soil 
und  Haben  (Debit  and  Credit) — a  book  that 
may  reasonably  be  claimed  as  the  most 
interesting  German  novel  of  social  life  of 
the  middle  of  the  century — appeared  in  1855, 


206   THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

five  years  before  Problematische  Naturen; 
and  yet  it  is  in  every  respect  a  more  modern 
creation.  Freytag  had,  no  doubt,  come  to  a 
greater  extent  under  English  influences ; 
he  was  a  literary  artist  of  a  higher  type,  and 
less  obsessed  by  ideas  extraneous  to  his  art ; 
all  this  has  lent  more  enduring  qualities  to 
his  work.  Then,  again,  the  picture  of  society 
he  gives  us,  and  the  problems  he  deals  with, 
are  comparatively  free  from  the  revolutionary 
unrest  of  Problematische  Naturen.  We  are 
brought  face  to  face  with  a  more  hopeful  state 
of  affairs ;  Germany  has  settled  down  to 
work.  Freytag  describes  for  us  the  com- 
mercial activity  on  which  the  prosperity  of  a 
nation  depends  more  than  on  its  politics. 
Even  the  conflict  between  aristocracy  and 
democracy,  which  is  foreshadowed  in  this 
novel,  is  not  treated  with  the  implacable 
spirit  of  the  1848  period,  or  of  the  later  social- 
democratic  era  ;  and  the  conclusion  of  the 
story  emphasises  the  advantages  of  a  concilia- 
tory policy  between  noble  birth  and  commer- 
cial efficiency.  Thus,  leaving  the  question 
of  priority  of  publication  out  of  the  question, 
one  might  reasonably  say  that  if  Problematische 
Naturen  is  the  novel  of  1848,  Soil  und  Hob  en 
is  the  representative  German  novel  of  ten 


THE    POST-ROMANTIC    EPOCH    207 

years  later.  No  other  of  Freytag's  novels 
made  so  great  an  incision  into  the  life  of  his 
time  as  this ;  but  his  second  story,  Die 
verlorene  Handschrift  (The  Lost  Manuscript), 
ought  not  to  pass  unmentioned ;  and  in  an 
ambitiously  planned  series  of  historical  novels, 
dealing  with  the  history  of  a  German  family 
through  the  centuries,  Die  Ahnen  (The  An- 
cestors), he  made,  as  we  shall  see,  a  contribu- 
tion of  importance  to  the  historical  fiction 
of  the  time. 

The  third  representative  novel  we  have  to 
deal  with,  Kinder  der  Welt  (Children  of  the 
World),  by  Paul  Heyse,  was  published  in 
1873  ;  this  book,  like  its  two  predecessors, 
holds  the  mirror  up  to  its  age,  that  age 
being  approximately  a  decade  later  than  the 
period  Freytag  reproduced.  Although  Heyse's 
peculiar  gifts  are  for  a  form  of  fiction — the 
short  story — which  demands  a  very  different 
kind  of  talent  from  the  long  novel — his 
Kinder  der  Welt  is  a  book  of  abundant  power. 
It  has  been  accused  of  being  lacking  in 
architectural  qualities,  in  construction;  but 
we  are  inclined  to  question  if  it  is  any  more 
deficient  in  those  qualities  than  the  novels 
which  have  just  been  dealt  with.  We  are 
more  concerned,  however,  with  the  ideas  of 


208  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

Kinder  der  Welt.  In  a  higher  degree  than 
its  predecessors,  it  embodies  the  intellectual 
strivings  of  its  time  ;  but  then  it  belonged  to 
an  age  that  had  more  leisure  and  thought  just 
for  these  higher  interests,  for  the  philosophy  of 
Schopenhauer,  for  the  theological  controversies 
that  raged  round  David  Friedrich  Strauss  and 
the  "  Tubingen  School,"  and  for  the  rapid 
advance  of  scientific  materialism.  It  is  these 
things  that  interest  Heyse  rather  than  purely 
social  or  political  problems ;  the  ominous 
discontent  of  the  later  social  democracy  is 
in  the  background,  and  the  novel  ends  on  a 
triumphant  note,  with  the  rejoicings  over 
the  victories  of  the  Franco-German  War. 

The  second  group  of  fiction  in  this  era  has, 
at  first  sight,  closer  ties  with  Romanticism 
than  with  the  "  Young  German "  period. 
The  novel  of  the  province  does  not  belong  to 
the  literature  of  ideas  in  the  political  or 
social  sense ;  but  it  must  not  be  forgotten 
that  the  democratic  leanings  of  the  political 
reformers  all  led  to  an  increased  interest  in 
the  German  "  Volk,"  to  a  desire  to  understand 
and  appreciate  the  soul  of  the  nation  as  it  was 
to  be  observed  in  the  unsophisticated  dwellers 
on  the  land.  The  first  German  master  of  the 
peasant  novel  has,  in  some  respects,  never  been 


THE   POST-ROMANTIC   EPOCH    209 

surpassed.  This  was  the  Swiss  pastor,  Albert 
Bitzius,  better  known  under  his  pseudonym 
of  Jeremias  Gotthelf.  Gotthelf  sees  his  Swiss 
peasant  folk  through  no  distorting  literary 
spectacles,  but  just  as  they  are ;  there  is  an 
elemental  poetry  in  his  unvarnished  realism 
and  even  in  his  nai've  and  character- 
istically Swiss  fondness  for  moralising.  Uli 
der  Knecht  (Uli  the  Servant)  and  Uli  der 
Pachter  (Uli  the  Farmer)  are  landmarks  in 
the  history  of  modern  peasant  literature. 
Berthold  Auerbach,  however,  the  South  Ger- 
man chronicler  of  Black  Forest  life,  was  in  his 
day  a  more  popular  writer  than  Gotthelf ; 
and  Auerbach's  Schwarzwalder  Dorfge- 
schichten  (Black  Forest  Village  Stories)  are  still 
widely  read.  But,  unfortunately,  he  was 
"  sicklied  o'er  with  the  pale  cast "  of  a 
superior  philosophic  culture ;  and  this  came 
too  often  between  him  and  the  simple  folk 
whose  fates  he  described.  Auerbach  also 
employed  the  wider  canvas  of  the  social  novel, 
but  here  he  dropped  almost  naturally  into  the 
wake  of  the  "  Young  German "  School. 
From  Auerbach  onwards,  the  peasant  novel 
is  a  constant  and  delightful  feature  in  German 
literature. 

The  latter  half  of  the  nineteenth  century  in 


210  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

Germany  is  marked  by  the  rise  of  a  highly 
developed  literature  of  the  province.  Swabia 
and  Bavaria  had  each  their  authors  of  peasant 
novels  ;  so,  too,  had  the  Tyrol ;  the  Bohemian 
Forest  possesses  an  extremely  sensitive  and 
delicately  strung  prose  poet  in  Adalbert 
Stifter ;  Upper  Austria,  at  a  somewhat  later 
date,  a  faithful,  unsentimental  chronicler  in  the 
dramatist,  Ludwig  Anzengruber,  and,  in  our 
own  day,  it  has  the  novelist  Peter  Rosegger. 
The  northern  provinces  also  shared,  although 
naturally  in  a  less  pronounced  degree,  in 
this  decentralising  tendency  ;  Thuringia,  for 
instance,  emerges  with  a  distinct  literary 
physiognomy  of  its  own  in  the  stories  of  Otto 
Ludwig,  a  writer  who  has  to  be  dealt  with 
immediately  as  an  important  contributor  to 
the  drama  of  the  middle  of  the  century. 

Most  marked  of  all,  perhaps,  is  the 
revival  of  an  independent  poetic  life  among 
the  Low  German  peoples  in  the  north  of 
the  German  area.  With  the  appearance  of 
Fritz  Reuter,  it  seemed  as  if  this  Low  German 
speaking  population  were  at  last  about  to 
assert  itself  in  literature  in  a  way  worthy 
of  the  people  that  had  given  the  sixteenth 
century  one  of  its  masterpieces,  Reineke  the 
Fox.  This  hope  has  hardly  been  realised,  for 


THE    POST-ROMANTIC    EPOCH    211 

Reuter  stands  alone  as  a  master  of  modern 
Plattdeutsch  prose,  although  in  Klaus  Groth, 
the  author  of  an  exquisite  collection  of  lyrics 
(Quickborn),  he  has  a  worthy  fellow- worker. 
But  the  Low  German  constituents  of  the 
modern  Empire  have  made  themselves  felt  in 
another  and  more  subtle  way.  The  spirit  and 
the  atmosphere  of  the  Northern  moors  and 
coasts  have  passed  over  into  High  German 
literature  to  an  extraordinary  degree  and  hold 
the  balance  easily  with  the  more  picturesque 
setting  of  the  South.  Reuter  takes  a  high 
place  among  the  novelists  of  his  time.  As  a 
humorous,  kindly  delineator  of  the  types  of 
his  Mecklenburg  world  he  is  unrivalled ;  he 
chronicles  simply  and  unassumingly,  and 
makes  the  impression  of  straightforward 
sincerity.  As  every  writer  gifted  with  humour, 
he  is  occasionally  tempted  to  sacrifice  absolute 
truth  to  an  exaggeration  of  some  effective 
eccentricity,  but  this  is  done  in  such  a  kindly, 
sympathetic  way  that  one  cannot  feel  offended 
by  it.  On  the  other  hand,  Reuter  makes  little 
or  no  pretension  to  construction  in  his  books  ; 
his  Ut  mine  Stromtid  (From  my  Farming 
Days),  and  the  novels  that  followed  it,  are 
chronicles  without  form  or  architectural  quali- 
ties of  any  kind,  virtually  accounts  of  his  own 


212   THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

life  and  experiences  ;  he  is  satisfied  to  bind 
together  what  he  has  to  say  with  the  thread 
of  an  unassuming,  sentimental  story  of  no 
poetic  significance. 

Compared  with  the  social  novel  and  the 
fiction  of  the  province,  the  historical  novel 
in  this  epoch  is  comparatively  unimportant. 
Not  but  what  it  was  in  high  favour  with  the 
reading  public  ;  in  the  sixties  and  seventies 
it  probably  enjoyed  a  popularity  which  it  had 
never  known  in  the  earlier  days  of  Hauff 
and  Alexis  ;  but,  as  literature,  it  had  fallen 
to  a  lower  level.  Die  Ahnen,  that  grandly 
planned  cycle  of  historical  romances  describing 
the  evolution  of  a  German  family  from  the 
dawn  of  history  to  the  middle  of  the  nineteenth 
century,  which  Freytag  offered  his  people  as  a 
national  prose  epic,  has  already  been  men- 
tioned ;  but  it  stands  alone.  Rarely  do  we 
find  anything  in  the  subsequent  historical 
fiction  which,  from  the  point  of  view  of 
artistic  achievement,  reaches  the  level  of  the 
best  novels  of  Freytag's  series.  Even  the 
vivid  resuscitation  of  the  dark  ages  which 
Scheffel  has  given  us  in  his  Ekkehard,  is 
an  isolated  achievement.  On  the  whole, 
the  German  historical  novel  of  this  period 
fell  a  victim  to  German  thoroughness,  to  the 


THE    POST-ROMANTIC   EPOCH    213 

glamour  of  that  historical  research  of  which 
German  scholarship  has  every  right  to  feel 
proud ;  it  attempted  to  be  historical  in  the 
first  instance  and  leave  the  art  to  take  care 
of  itself.  Consequently  but  little  importance 
can  be  attached  in  a  survey  such  as  the  present 
to  the  once  popular  work  of  writers  like 
Georg  Ebers  and  Felix  Dahn ;  the  historical 
novel  had,  as  such,  clearly  become  dis- 
credited. 

There  is  still  another  form  of  German 
romance  in  this  epoch  which,  although 
virtually  represented  by  only  one  novel,  is  not 
to  be  overlooked  ;  for  that  one  novel  is  unique 
of  its  kind,  Der  grune  Heinrich  (Green  Henry], 
by  Gottfried  Keller.  Keller  is  Switzerland's 
greatest  modern  writer,  and  a  master  of  the 
first  rank.  The  significance  of  his  Grune 
Heinrich,  the  "  Dichtung  und  Wahrheit "  of 
the  author's  own  early  life,  is  that  it  is  virtu- 
ally the  last  great  book  in  the  royal  line  of 
German  fiction  ;  the  final  link  in  the  chain  of 
great  Romantic  novels  which  had  culminated 
in  the  classical  period  with  Wilhelm  Meisters 
Lehrjahre.  Der  grune  Heinrich  is  a  book 
of  unimpeachable  sincerity,  one  of  those 
masterpieces  of  the  world's  literature  that 
convince  by  their  innate  truth  of  expression  ; 


214  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

a  book  that  is  conceived  without  the  slightest 
apparent  artifice  on  the  part  of  the  writer 
himself,  he  being  perhaps  only  dimly  conscious 
of  all  he  has  put  into  it.  We  will  not  claim 
Der  grune  Heinrich  as  a  great  European  novel ; 
for  that  matter,  we  do  not  think  it  has  been 
translated,  or  is  likely  to  be  translated,  into 
other  tongues ;  but  it  is  a  great  German  novel 
of  the  national  type,  perhaps  the  greatest 
of  its  century. 

Keller's  supreme  strength  lies,  however,  not 
in  the  long  novel,  of  which  this  alone  has  a 
claim  to  the  first  importance,  but  in  the 
"  Novelle,"  or  short  story,  the  form  of 
literature  in  which  Germany  has  done  her  best 
prose  work.  If  the  long  German  novel  is,  as 
a  rule,  deficient  in  the  qualities  of  form  and 
construction,  the  Germans  have  often  shown 
themselves  the  strictest  masters  of  form  in 
their  short  stories.  The  chief  place  among  these 
writers  belongs  to  Keller.  In  1856  he  pub- 
lished his  first  collection  of  Die  Leute  von 
Seldwyla  (The  People  of  Seldwyla},  followed  by 
a  second  volume,  and  his  Sieben  Legenden 
(Seven  Legends)  ;  then  came,  in  1878,  Zuricher 
Novellen  (Zurich  Stories],  and  later  Das 
Sinngedicht  (The  Epigram).  In  these  collec- 
tions are  to  be  found  at  least  half-a-dozen  short 


THE   POST-ROMANTIC   EPOCH    215 

stories  which  hold  a  place  of  their  own  in 
German  literature.  Here  again,  as  in  Der  grime 
Heinrich,  the  qualities  that  distinguish  Keller 
are  those  by  which  we  differentiate  genius 
from  mere  talent.  Other  European  masters, 
such  as  Keller's  fellow-countryman,  Conrad 
Ferdinand  Meyer,  or  Maupassant,  have  ex- 
celled him  in  that  crispness  and  conciseness 
which  have  always  been  the  peculiar  beauty 
and  merit  of  the  short  story  in  the  hands  of 
Latin  writers,  but  he  is  second  to  none  in  the 
possession  of  the  seeing  eye  and  the  sensitive 
imagination.  The  tragic  or  comic  effect  of 
these  stories  is  unforced — one  might  even  say, 
uncontemplated ;  it  comes  naturally  and  un- 
consciously. There  is,  indeed,  no  more  con- 
vincing proof  of  Keller's  greatness  as  a  writer 
than  the  fact  that  he  appears  to  be  so  often 
unaware  of  his  power. 

Keller  is  the  master  of  the  German  short- 
story  writers,  but  he  is  far  from  being  the 
only  eminent  one.  North  Germany  pos- 
sesses in  Theodor  Storm  a  prose-poet  of  a 
similar  type  ;  but  Storm's  range  is  not  so  wide, 
his  appeal  not  so  universal  as  Keller's ;  nor 
is  his  work  built  on  such  permanent  founda- 
tions. The  early  "  Novellen "  of  Storm, 
bathed  as  they  are  in  the  gentle  light  of  a 


216   THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

Romantic  retrospect  and  renunciation,  can 
no  longer  appeal  to  our  more  robust  and 
realistic  age.  They  are  the  expression — 
we  think  especially  of  gems  such  as  Immen- 
see,  Viola  Tricolor,  Im  Sonnenschein — and  the 
very  beautiful  expression,  of  a  Romantic  age, 
in  which  human  souls  were  attuned  to  passive, 
renunciatory  emotions,  and  all  nature  sym- 
pathised, as  only  Romantic  nature  could. 
When,  at  a  later  period,  Storm  endeavoured 
to  adapt  himself  to  the  movement  of  his 
time  and  adopted  a  more  realistic  form  of 
narrative  art,  his  strength  was  not  always 
adequate  to  carry  out  his  task. 

Paul  Heyse,  whom  we  have  already  men- 
tioned, represents  still  another  phase  of  the 
German  short  story.  He  is  by  far  the  most 
prolific  of  all ;  the  inexhaustible  variety  of  his 
many  volumes  of  "  Novellen  "  is  marvellous. 
But  Heyse,  too,  was  more  the  man  of  a  particu- 
lar period  than  his  Swiss  contemporary.  His 
work  bears  the  stamp  of  an  age  in  which  culture 
was  imparted  or  imposed  from  without ;  an  age 
of  an  artificial — at  least  so  it  seems  to  us  now 
— grace  introduced  from  other  literatures ; 
he  shows  a  marked  preference  for  stereo- 
typed characters  and  for  stereotyped  ethi- 
cal and  aesthetic  problems.  Least  success- 


THE    POST-ROMANTIC    EPOCH    217 

fully  of  all  has  Heyse's  brilliant,  facile 
style  stood  the  test  of  the  years.  And  of 
the  many  stories  he  has  given  us,  very  few 
have  maintained  a  place  in  the  affections  of 
his  people,  such  as  Keller's,  Storm's,  or 
Conrad  Ferdinand  Meyer's  still  do.  Another 
reason  for  the  transiency  of  Heyse's  work  lies 
in  the  fact  that  he  was  the  representative  of  a 
very  distinct  and  narrowly  denned  phase  of 
German  literature.  As  one  of  the  leaders 
of  the  Munich  group  of  writers,  with  whom 
we  have  still  to  deal,  he  was  identified  with 
the  pessimistic  trend  of  literature  in  the 
seventies,  and  that  pessimism  took  the  form 
of  a  sharp  antagonism  to  all  the  new  forces 
of  the  succeeding  period,  the  forces  of  truth 
and  realism,  which  have  made  for  strength 
in  the  German  literature  of  our  time.  Thus 
Heyse  suffered  as  the  "  Young  Germans " 
suffered,  from  the  lack  of  ability  to  rise  above 
his  particular  age  ;  and  he  has  had  to  pay  the 
penalty. 

The  master  of  form  among  the  short-story 
writers  of  the  century  is  the  Swiss  writer  who 
has  already  been  mentioned  in  these  pages, 
Conrad  Ferdinand  Meyer.  Meyer  has  written 
little  and  that  little  comparatively  late  in 
life ;  thus  although  a  contemporary  of  the 


218   THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

men  we  have  just  been  considering,  he  belongs 
in  his  literary  production  to  a  somewhat 
later  time.  He  is  practically  a  writer  of  the 
eighties.  Meyer  writes  with  infinite  care ; 
his  style  is  clear,  polished,  at  times  objective 
almost  to  coldness  ;  he  is  a  Platen  in  prose  ; 
and  his  strict  regard  for  form  is  a  quality  by 
no  means  common  in  German  prose-writers. 
A  devoted  lover  of  the  great  age  of  the 
Renaissance,  he  seeks  his  themes  with 
preference  from  that,  or,  at  least,  from  some 
equally  remote  period,  which  he  reproduces 
for  us  in  unforgettable  pictures  unconfused 
by  modern  ethical  issues  or  subjective  prob- 
lems. There  is  aristocratic  distinction  about 
all  his  writing,  and  not  a  trace  of  concession 
to  the  sentimental  tastes  of  the  day  to  which 
the  historical  novelists  appealed  too  readily. 
In  a  higher  degree  than  to  his  more  ambitious 
romances,  such  as  Jurg  Jenatsch,  and  Der 
Heilige  (The  Saint],  we  are  inclined  to  give 
the  palm  to  his  exquisite  short  stories,  like 
Plautus  im  Nonnenldoster  (Plauius  in  the 
Nunnery],  and  Die  Versuchung  des  Pescara 
(The  Temptation  of  Pescara].  Austria,  too, 
contributed  to  the  "  Novelle  "  ;  the  polished 
workmanship  of  Ferdinand  von  Saar,  and  the 
genial  filigree  art  of  Marie  von  Ebner-Eschen- 


THE    POST-ROMANTIC   EPOCH    219 

bach  have  a  charm  of  their  own,  and  lend 
strength  and  variety  to  this  form  of  German 
writing. 

At  first  sight  the  drama  of  the  middle  of  the 
century  offers  less  scope  for  detailed  treatment 
than  the  novel.  To  judge  by  the  rather 
torpid  condition  of  the  German  theatres,  their 
cultivation  of  Kotzebue-like  talents  such  as 
Roderich  Benedix,  and  their  enslavement  by 
the  French  contemporary  theatre,  it  might 
seem  as  if  there  were  little  to  say  at  all ;  for 
the  tedious  and  uninspired  imitations  of 
Schiller's  tragedy,  which  represented  "  liter- 
ature "  on  the  German  stage  of  the  sixties 
and  the  seventies,  hardly  demand  more  than 
passing  notice.  And  this  is  the  point  of  view 
which  will  be  found  generally  maintained  in 
older  German  literary  histories.  But  recent 
developments  of  European  dramatic  literature 
have  put  Germany's  share  in  the  evolution  of 
that  literature  in  rather  a  different  light.  It 
has  been  discovered  that  Germany  did  assist  in 
a  very  material  way  in  moulding  the  latter-day 
European  drama,  and  that  that  assistance 
came  neither  from  her  pseudo-historical  writers 
nor  from  her  "  Tendenzdramatiker  "  (or 
"  dramatists  with  a  purpose"),  who  merely 
carried  on  the  political  and  polemical  tradi- 


220   THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

tions  which  had  come  down  from  the  "  Young 
Germans." 

The  main  responsibility  of  this  task  was 
borne  by  three  men,  all  of  them  born  in  the 
same  year,  the  year  of  Germany's  national 
liberation,  1813.  These  are  Friedrich  Hebbel, 
Otto  Ludwig  and  Richard  Wagner.  Of  these, 
the  one  who  lived  longest,  Richard  Wagner, 
ought  to  be  considered  first ;  for  his  work 
goes  farthest  back  into  the  past.  Richard 
Wagner,  the  reformer  of  the  music-drama, 
which  in  Germany,  as  in  the  Italy  of  the  seven- 
teenth and  eighteenth  centuries,  cannot  be 
denied  a  place  in  the  history  of  the  literary 
drama,  began  in  the  wake  of  the  Romanti- 
cists ;  his  early  works  from  Rienzi  and  Der 
flicgende  Hollander  to  Lohengrin  and  Tann- 
hauser  are  all  Romantic  operas  ;  they  deal  with 
Romantic  themes  and  deal  with  them  in  a 
purely  Romantic  way.  The  favourite  renunci- 
ation motive  is  here ;  the  Romantic  sentiment 
and  the  Romantic  dreams.  Nor  is  the  second 
and  greater  Wagner,  the  Wagner  of  Tristan 
und  Isolde,  Die  Meister singer,  Der  Ring  des 
Nibelungen  and  Parsifal,  a  man  of  such  modern 
literary  ideas  as,  for  instance,  Hebbel  is. 
This  Wagner  was  still  at  heart  a  Romanticist, 
who  had  absorbed,  as  no  other  of  his  contem- 


THE    POST-ROMANTIC    EPOCH    221 

poraries,  the  spirit  of  pessimistic  Romanticism 
which  lay  over  Germany  at  the  time.  In 
Tristan  and  Der  Ring  des  Nibelungen  the 
pessimistic  movement  in  European  literature, 
which  we  have  already  seen  mirrored  in  the 
work  of  the  great  Austrians,  Grillparzer  and 
Lenau,  reaches  a  kind  of  culmination ;  Die 
Meistersinger  von  Nurnberg  might  well  be 
described  as  the  best  comedy  produced  by 
that  movement  in  German  literature  which 
has  been  associated  with  the  city  of  Munich  ; 
while  Parsifal,  in  1882,  marks  the  close  of  the 
epoch  of  pessimism.  But  by  virtue  of  his  mag- 
nificent ideals  of  a  German  national  theatre, 
which  were  realised  in  the  "  Festspielhaus  " 
at  Bayreuth,  opened  with  the  Ring  in  1876, 
and  by  virtue  of  his  music,  Wagner's  influence 
has  extended  far  beyond  the  era  with  which 
his  ideas  as  a  poet  are  associated  ;  he  has 
exerted  a  force  second  to  none  in  the  evolution 
of  the  modern  German  theatre. 

Much  more,  however,  of  a  dramatist  of 
to-day  is  Friedrich  Hebbel ;  indeed,  so  much 
was  Hebbel  in  advance  of  his  age,  that  in  his 
lifetime  he  received  but  scant  recognition. 
But  he  is  the  pioneer  of  the  whole  modern 
movement  in  the  drama.  The  production  of 
his  first  play,  Judith,  in  1840,  is  a  landmark  of 


222   THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

the  first  importance.  Hebbel  here,  no  doubt, 
received  his  literary  stimulus  from  the  "  Young 
German "  school,  and  the  more  obvious 
features  of  that  school  cling  to  his  early  work, 
clung  to  him,  indeed,  all  his  life  long  ;  his 
fondness  for  intricate  psychological  situations 
and  for  social  problems  dealt  with  in  a  big, 
symbolic  style,  came  from  "  Young  Germany." 
But  the  virtue  whereby  Hebbel  has  become 
a  force  in  literature  was,  as  far  as  we  can  see, 
entirely  his  own  ;  he  was  an  autodidact  in  the 
art  of  poetry  as  in  knowledge,  and  looked  at 
life  across  a  temperament  of  extraordinary 
originality.  He  saw  human  beings  from  an 
angle  from  which  no  one  had  ever  looked  at 
them  before  ;  so  peculiar  was  it,  indeed,  that 
it  appeared  to  his  unimaginative  contem- 
poraries as  merely  fatuous.  He  came  to  the 
conclusion  that  the  day  for  outward,  superficial 
happenings  in  the  drama  was  passing,  and  that 
the  real  business  of  the  theatre  was  to  present 
the  movements  of  the  soul ;  he  put  people  into 
his  dramas  of  a  strange,  unusual  type,  inspired 
with  complicated,  often  superhuman  passions, 
and  he  involved  them  in  extraordinary  situa- 
tions. And  having  done  so,  he  proceeded 
to  subject  these  characters  to  a  penetrating 
analysis  ;  he  stripped  them  bare,  investigated 


THE    POST-ROMANTIC   EPOCH    223 

/ 

their  most  secret  motives.  Above  all  things, 
he  was  bent  on  establishing  the  rights  of 
personality  ;  personality  is  the  fundamental 
theme  round  which  everything  turns  in  his 
plays  ;  his  heroes  or  heroines  who  succumb, 
succumb  in  a  tragic  fight  for  the  rights  of  their 
individuality.  This  is  what  lends  such  enor- 
mous interest  to  Hebbel's  greater  works,  to  his 
Genoveva,  Herodes  und  Mariamne,  Gyges  und 
sein  Ring,  Agnes  Bernauer  and  Die  Nibelungen  ; 
they  are  all  dramas  in  which  the  sacred  rights 
of  personality  are  in  conflict  with  the  social 
order,  whether  that  order  be  represented  by  a 
human  antagonist,  by  the  State,  or  by  the  ideas 
of  the  time  in  which  the  drama  plays.  A 
realist  in  the  modern  sense  Hebbel  is  not ;  he 
is  not  even  as  much  of  a  realist  as  many  of  his 
"  Young  German  "  predecessors  and  contem- 
poraries. Realism  was  not  his  business.  Nor 
would  we  like  to  claim  for  Hebbel  supreme 
rank  as  a  dramatic  poet ;  in  respect  of  verse,  of 
poetic  fancy,  and  certainly  of  popular  appeal, 
he  is  surpassed  by  Grillparzer  in  Austria,  by 
the  masters  of  the  Romantic  drama  in  France  ; 
but  he  is  a  pioneer  and  forerunner  of  that 
modern  individualism  which  was  ultimately 
to  rise  out  of  the  ashes  of  Romantic  pessimism 
in  Germany,  and  which,  in  the  work  of 


224   THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

Henrik  Ibsen  and  other  modern  writers, 
has  turned  the  whole  current  of  the  drama. 
There  is  nothing  more  profoundly  original 
in  the  literature  of  the  nineteenth  century 
than  the  plays  of  Hebbel.  The  drama  of 
inward  happenings,  of  the  subtle  movements 
of  the  soul,  which  has  ousted  the  problem- 
drama  of  the  mid-century  French  theatre, 
and  rendered  effete  the  type  of  play  which 
depends  for  its  interest  solely  on  the  clash  of 
outward  interests,  begins  with  him. 

Compared  with  this,  the  role  which  Hebbel's 
contemporary,  Otto  Ludwig,  played,  is  com- 
paratively unimportant ;  he  was  one  of  those 
unfortunate  writers  who  find  it  extremely 
difficult  to  bring  anything  to  a  conclusion. 
He  was  more  or  less  of  an  invalid  all  his  life, 
and  his  collected  writings  are  small  in  bulk  ; 
they  include,  however,  one  admirable  novel, 
which  occupies  a  place  by  itself  in  the  fiction  of 
the  time,  Zwischen  Himmel  und  Erde  (Between 
Heaven  and  Earth),  a  story  of  minute,  pains- 
taking realism,  of  infinitely  fine  detail-work  ; 
and  one  or,  at  most,  two  dramas  of  real  signi- 
ficance, namely,  Der  Erbforster  (The  Forester 
Presumptive)  and  Die  Makkabaer  (The 
Macchabees).  We  doubt  if  these  plays  would 
make  much  appeal  nowadays  outside  Ger- 


THE    POST-ROMANTIC   EPOCH    225 

aany ;  nor,  indeed,  have  they  any  of  that 
wider  significance  which  attaches  to  the  work 
of  Hebbel.  But  they  did  good  work  in  German 
literature  by  supplementing  Hebbel ;  the 
realism  which  is  lacking  in  Hebbel,  is  a 
distinctive  feature  in  Ludwig's  work.  The 
drama  of  "  Young  Germany  "  had,  it  is  true, 
been  realistic  enough  in  its  way ;  the  tradition 
of  the  domestic  drama,  which  remained  the  most 
vital  heritage  from  the  eighteenth  century, 
was  nothing  if  not  realistic  ;  but  that  drama 
had  fallen,  in  respect  of  literary  qualities,  on 
evil  days.  Now,  what  Ludwig  did  was  to 
restore  to  these  traditions  their  lost  poetic 
dignity.  His  Erbforster  vindicated  again  this 
type  of  play,  and  in  so  doing  kept  it  alive 
and  made  it  a  factor  in  the  later  develop- 
ment of  the  drama.  But  the  difference 
between  Der  Erbforster  and  Hebbel's  tragedy 
of  middle-class  domesticity,  Maria  Magdalene, 
is  significant.  Hebbel  treated  his  domestic, 
middle-class  theme  with  a  quite  incongruous 
psychological  refinement  and  subtlety  ;  the 
issue  of  his  story  becomes,  indeed,  in  his  hands 
a  high  tragedy,  a  psychological  problem  of 
the  individual  imprisoned  in  the  confines  of 
a  narrow  home.  Ludwig's  Erbforster  deals  with 
strong  passions,  with  unholy  revenge  ;  it  is  a 


226   THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

drama  in  which  the  truth  of  milieu,  the  reality, 
is  the  chief  thing,  in  which  there  is  no  kind  of 
higher  problematic  or  psychological  interest  at 
all.  And  this  same  clear  realism  is  imported 
by  Ludwig  into  his  biblical  tragedy,  Die 
Makkabder.  Here  again,  the  comparison  with 
the  "  Young  German  "  biblical  drama  shows 
significantly  the  advance  towards  a  healthier 
outlook  on  life,  undistorted  by  political  biases 
and  tendencies,  which  Ludwig' s  work  meant 
for  the  German  theatre. 

It  was  perhaps  pardonable  in  older  his- 
torians to  underestimate  these  innovations  ; 
for  they  meant  so  very  little  to  the  actual 
theatre  ;  so  little  for  the  development  of  the 
drama  as  a  whole,  which  went  on  its  uninspired 
way  of  imitation  unaffected.  It  was  not  until 
the  rise  of  a  realistic  drama  in  France  and  a 
new  drama  of  personality  in  Scandinavia,  that 
Germany  began  to  understand  what  pioneers 
her  two  mid-century  dramatists  had  been. 

We  have  still,  in  the  present  chapter,  to 
deal  with  one  other  phase  of  mid-century 
German  literature,  the  literary  movement 
associated  with  Munich.  To  describe  this 
movement  as  a  "  Munich  School  "  is  perhaps 
a  misnomer,  for  there  were  no  very  close  ties, 
unless  those  created  by  the  generous  patron- 


THE    POST-ROMANTIC    EPOCH    227 

Age  of  the  Bavarian  court,  which  brought 
the  poets  in  question  together.  The  real  tie 
was  a  tacit  agreement  with  regard  to  the 
pessimism  of  the  age.  In  this  respect  the 
Munich  poets  may  be  taken  as  representative 
of  the  outlook  on  life  of  the  German  writers 
of  the  sixties  and  seventies.  Some  of  the 
leading  writers  of  the  school,  Emanuel  Geibel, 
for  instance,  and  Paul  Heyse,  have  already 
been  discussed  in  these  pages.  But  the 
majority  of  its  members  can  make  no  claim 
to  detailed  consideration  in  a  survey  like  the 
present.  The  school  embraced  men  of  very 
different  types,  all  distinguished  by  a  high 
literary  culture,  a  keen  sensitiveness  to  artistic 
impression,  and,  we  might  add,  in  most  cases, 
a  warm  love  for  Italy ;  but  the  inertia  of  a  will- 
less  fatalism  and  pessimism  was  characteristic 
of  most  of  them.  There  were  noble  dilettantes 
like  Graf  Adolf  Friedrich  von  Schack,  under 
whose  patronage  the  movement  of  the  time  in 
painting  was  brought  closely  into  touch  with 
the  literary  school  ;  devotees  of  the  mid- 
century  pseudo-orientalism,  such  as  Friedrich 
Bodenstedt,  whose  Lieder  des  Mirza  Schaffy 
(Songs  of  Mirza  Schaffy)  enjoyed  an  extra- 
ordinary, but  transient  vogue  ;  deeply  tragic 
natures  like  Heinrich  Leuthold  and  Hermann 


228  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

Lingg,  who  were  yet  wanting  in  the  supreme 
strength  to  make  their  poetry  prevail ;  or, 
again,  men  like  Robert  Hamerling,  who 
disguised  an  inner  hopelessness  and  hollow- 
ness  under  an  outward  splendour  of  highly- 
coloured  poetic  effects  ;  and  lastly,  cultured 
writers  of  short  stories  such  as  Wilhelm 
Heinrich  Riehl.  Indeed,  the  only  member 
of  this  circle  who  succeeded  in  putting  a 
certain  stamp  on  his  age  as  a  popular  poet, 
was  Joseph  Victor  von  Scheffel,  whose  romance 
in  verse,  Der  Trompeter  von  Sakkingen  (The 
Trumpeter  of  Sakkingen),  in  spite  of  its  often 
trivial  sentiment,  had  at  least  the  merit  of 
being  in  healthy  touch  with  the  soil. 

On  the  whole,  this  literature  is  essentially 
a  literature  of  the  surface;  it  was  not  pro- 
found, and  perhaps  even  its  pessimism  was 
but  skin-deep.  It  added  nothing  to  Ger- 
many's stock  of  ideas,  philosophical,  ethical 
or  aesthetic  ;  at  most,  it  tried  to  reconcile  the 
Hegelianism  of  the  earlier  time,  which  it  had 
not  the  strength  to  shake  off,  with  the 
philosophy  of  Schopenhauer  ;  but  it  was  not 
original  or  independent  enough  to  substitute 
anything  fresh  for  the  old,  worn-out  Roman- 
ticism ;  an  air  of  dilettantism  was  everywhere, 
of  lack  of  seriousness,  of  unwillingness  to  face 


THE   POST-ROMANTIC    EPOCH    229 

life  as  it  is.  The  Munich  School  declared  its 
preference  frankly  for  the  gentle  trivialities  of 
a  poetry  that  appealed  primarily  to  the  super- 
ficial sentiments,  or  for  the  more  reprehensible 
humour  of  a  beer-table  order.  But  the  unrest 
seethed  beneath  the  surface  ;  all  that  these 
writers  did  was  to  gloss  it  over,  to  pretend 
that  it  did  not  exist. 

The  time  was  clearly  ripe  for  a  healthier 
attitude  towards  literature ;  and,  indeed,  signs 
of  a  change  in  this  direction  are  traceable  in 
the  intellectual  undercurrents  of  the  age. 
There  was  no  question  yet  of  a  revival  of 
German  idealism  on  a  new  basis  ;  but  the 
Germans  were  turning  their  attention  to 
science  rather  than  metaphysics ;  a  know- 
ledge of  the  real  world  began  to  appear  of 
more  vital  importance  than  the  shadowy 
speculations  of  the  Romantic  philosophers. 
Thus  there  is  no  wonder  that  the  power  of 
Hegel  over  German  minds  was  beginning  to 
wane,  and  many  turned  even  to  the  systemat- 
ised  materialism  of  Auguste  Comte.  A  new 
philosophy  was  demanded  in  accordance 
with  scientific  premisses  ;  and  the  contro- 
versies raised  by  Darwin's  Origin  of  Species 
took  the  place  of  those  of  the  previous  gene- 
ration round  questions  of  metaphysical 


230  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

idealism.  In  the  fifties  and  the  sixties  the 
favourite  reading  of  the  intellectual  classes 
was  a  kind  of  semi-philosophical  scientific 
literature,  the  aim  of  which  was  to  popularise 
the  new  scientific  theories  and  hypotheses. 
The  scientific  spirit  reacted  in  other  fields, 
above  all,  in  history  ;  and,  under  the  guidance 
of  masters  like  Theodor  Mommsen  and 
Leopold  von  Ranke,  there  arose  a  new 
generation  of  extremely  able  historical 
scholars,  who  won  world-wide  respect  for 
German  historical  research. 

Less  in  antagonism  to  the  spirit  of  Hegel 
was  the  new  social  philosophy  of  the  middle 
of  the  century ;  the  scientific  spirit  was  here 
brought  to  bear  on  the  corporate  social  life. 
Industrial  organisation  necessitated  a  study 
of  the  laws  that  govern  human  society ;  the 
fundamental  principles  of  political  economy 
had  to  be  revised  and  even  recast.  It  is  to 
this  age  we  owe  the  origin  of  that  social- 
democratic  philosophy  which  was  to  play  so 
large  a  role  in  the  subsequent  political  life  of 
Germany. 

But  the  Germans  as  a  people  have  never 
thriven  on  materialism ;  and  the  unmeta- 
physical,  scientific  spirit  of  the  sixties  was 
even  more  blighting  in  its  effects  on  literature 


THE    POST-ROMANTIC   EPOCH    231 

than  the  Hegelianism  of  a  decade  or  two  earlier. 
Science  and  literature  could  not  fraternise 
— not  yet  at  least — and  poetry  was  still 
obliged  to  cling  to  her  old-world  ideals.  The 
stimulus  for  new  developments  had  first 
to  come,  as  almost  always  in  the  long 
history  of  German  literary  endeavour,  from 
abroad.  With  that  stimulus  we  propose  to 
deal  in  the  following  chapter. 


CHAPTER   VH 

THE   LAST  PHASE 

WHEN  the  literary  historian  comes  within 
the  range  of  writers  who  are  still  amongst  us, 
it  behoves  him  to  go  warily.  In  a  small  book, 
such  as  the  present,  it  might  seem  the  better 
part  of  wisdom  to  draw  a  hard  and  fast  line 
excluding  still  living  authors ;  but  with 
German  literature  such  a  procedure  is  difficult. 
The  reader  has  a  legitimate  desire  to  see  how 
the  new  German  Empire  of  1871  has  found 
expression  in  literature ;  and  there  are  certain 
features  and  traits  in  the  contemporary 
activity  of  Germany  which  give  meaning  to 
the  rather  arid  phase  of  literary  development 
which  has  just  been  discussed  in  these  pages. 
The  recent  literary  period  rounds  off  the  cen- 
tury ;  the  twenty  years  from  1880  to  1900 
gives,  as  it  were,  purpose  to  the  twenty  years 
from  1860  to  1880  ;  and,  best  reason  of  all 
for  the  present  chapter,  the  German  literature 
of  our  time  has  shown  a  vitality  and  originality 

232 


THE   LAST   PHASE  283 

which  make  it  imperative  that  it  should  not 
be  passed  over  in  silence. 

The  strengthening  of  German  national 
life,  which  followed  the  establishment  of 
the  Empire  in  1871,  was  slow  in  showing 
itself  in  literature.  Of  the  poetry  which  the 
war  itself  inspired,  the  less  said  the  better. 
The  depressing  atmosphere  of  pessimism  was 
not  dispersed  by  the  victories  of  the  Franco- 
German  War ;  Schopenhauer  was  still  the 
dominant  force  in  German  thought,  andEduard 
von  Hartmann,  in  spite  of  his  leanings  towards 
Hegelianism,  hardly  mitigated  the  pessimistic 
outlook.  The  outstanding  artistic  achieve- 
ment of  the  early  years,  the  performance  of 
Der  Ring  des  Nibelungen  at  Bayreuth  in  1876, 
was,  as  we  have  seen,  virtually  a  triumph  of 
this  pessimistic  movement.  The  only  signs 
of  new  vigour  were  to  be  seen  at  the  univer- 
sities, and  in  the  increased  respect  in  which 
the  German  schoolmaster,  to  whom  Bismarck 
had  ascribed  the  victory  of  Sedan,  was  held. 
The  first  effort  of  the  united  German  nation 
was  not  to  be  a  poetically  productive  people, 
but  to  be  a  cultured  nation ;  and  before  the 
idol  of  culture  all  went  down.  History, 
philology,  philosophy,  all  flourished ;  poetry 
alone  was  left  out  in  the  cold. 


234  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

The  stimulus  to  greater  things  came  from 
without ;  and  then  only  when  the  new 
generation  which  had  grown  up  as  citizens  of 
the  empire  came  into  power.  In  the  eighties 
a  new  spirit  crept  into  the  intellectual 
life  of  Germany.  In  the  philosophy  of  the 
schools  the  long  reign  of  Hegelianism  was 
broken  by  a  reversion  to  Kant ;  amidst  the 
crying  demands  of  the  living  present,  historical 
culture  ceased  to  be  the  fetish  it  had  been 
for  so  long ;  Goethe  became  recognised  as  the 
supreme  poetic  force  in  modern  Germany, 
and  pessimism  was  obliged  to  loosen  its  grip. 
Literature  passed  into  the  hands  of  the  young  ; 
and  the  young  rarely  remain  pessimists  for 
long.  In  Ernst  von  Wildenbruch's  historical 
dramas  the  new  generation  felt  a  throb  of  life 
that  they  had  sought  in  vain  in  the  bloodless 
classical  and  historical  dramas  on  Schiller's 
model,  with  which  the  German  theatres  in 
the  previous  decades  had  given  an  air  of 
respectability  to  their  repertories  of  flimsy,  un- 
literary  comedies  and  farces,  and  translations 
from  the  French.  With  the  importation  of 
the  realistic  movement  from  France,  Russia 
and  Scandinavia,  the  drama  and  novel  took 
a  great  sweep  upwards.  Dazzled  by  the 
new  light  that  burst  upon  them,  the  young 


THE    LAST   PHASE  235 

writers  of  the  later  eighties  and  the  nineties 
hardly  knew  where  to  begin ;  they  wrote  novels 
in  the  ultra-realistic  manner  of  the  French 
realists  ;  they  wrote  dramas  dealing  with  the 
most  sordid  aspects  of  modern  society;  and 
in  almost  every  case  they  seemed  bent  on 
being  more  extreme  than  their  models.  The 
result  was  necessarily  a  great  deal  of  crude, 
undigested  literary  production,  and  of  what, 
by  its  time,  was  regarded  as  "  unhealthy  " 
literature.  But  this  was  only  the  inevitable 
prelude.  Before  many  years  had  passed,  the 
slavishly  realistic  mood  was  left  behind,  and 
the  inborn  Germanic  idealism  began  to  assert 
itself  anew. 

The  chief  force  behind  this  revival  was  a 
thinker  who  embodied  as  no  other  the  spirit 
of  revolt  against  the  past,  Friedrich  Nietzsche. 
Nietzsche  had  begun  his  literary  career  as  a 
fighter  against  the  traditions  that  lay  so 
heavy  on  the  German  mind  ;  he  attacked  the 
intellectual  cowardice  of  his  nation,  which, 
ostrich-like,  hid  its  head  in  the  sands  of  history, 
instead  of  facing  the  problems  of  the  present ; 
and  although  he  had  himself  graduated  in  the 
school  of  Schopenhauer,  his  day  of  reckoning 
with  Schopenhauer  soon  came.  Nietzsche 
renounced  pessimism  and  what  was  still 


236  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

harder  for  him,  broke  with  his  most  intimate 
friend,  Richard  Wagner  ;  and  in  the  place  of 
the  old  order  of  things  he  set  a  vigorous 
optimism  which  has  acted  on  contemporary 
Germany  like  a  tonic.  Nietzsche's  Also 
sprach  Zaraihustra  (So  spake  Zarathustra) 
is  the  literary  masterpiece  of  the  new  era 
in  Germany's  literature,  and  the  symbol  of 
Germany's  regeneration.  Be  the  master  of 
life,  not  its  slave,  Nietzsche  preached ;  accept 
no  tradition,  however  great  the  authority 
behind  it ;  "  erwirb  es,  um  es  zu  besitzen." 
The  vital  importance  of  the  radicalism  of 
Nietzsche's  thought  lay  less  in  its  positive 
achievement  than  in  its  stimulating  effect ; 
it  gave  the  young  generation  courage  to  face 
life  in  its  own  way,  to  see  things  from  its 
own  individual  point  of  view.  It  has  con- 
sequently made  the  new  German  literature 
pre-eminently  a  literature  of  ideas  and  an 
anti-traditional  literature. 

The  signs  of  revival  were  most  apparent 
at  first  in  the  drama.  We  have  already 
mentioned  the  work  of  Ernst  von  Wildenbruch 
as  marking  a  revival  of  serious  purpose  in  the 
theatre  ;  but  his  historical  dramas  represent 
rather  a  pouring  of  still  fermenting  wine  into 
old  bottles  than  a  renovation  of  the  bottles 


THE   LAST   PHASE  237 

themselves,  which  was  quite  as  necessary. 
Contemporary  with  Wildenbruch,  there  arose 
in  Austria  a  dramatist,  who  with  greater 
vigour  and  less  conventional  genius  replaced 
the  "  Volksstiick  "  or  popular  play,  which  had 
degenerated  into  frivolity  and  sentimentality, 
by  a  serious,  realistic  drama  of  peasant  life. 
The  dialect  plays  of  Ludwig  Anzengruber 
belong  to  the  very  best  of  their  time.  But 
the  most  hopeful  signs  of  new  life  were  to  be 
seen  in  Berlin,  where  a  "  Freie  Biihne,"  or 
Independent  Theatre,  had  been  formed  on 
the  model  of  the  French  theatre  libre ;  it 
was  inaugurated  in  1888  with  what  the  young 
revolutionaries  of  the  eighties  looked  upon  as 
the  most  powerful  drama  of  its  time,  Ibsen's 
Ghosts ;  and  Ghosts  was  followed  by  the  first 
work  of  a  German  author,  Vor  Sonnenauf- 
gang  (Before  Sunrise),  by  Gerhart  Hauptmann. 
This  was  in  1889,  and  only  a  few  months 
later,  Hermann  Sudermann,  another  German 
dramatist,  who  was  hitherto  known  as  the 
author  of  an  admirable  novel,  Frau  Sorge 
(Dame  Care),  and  a  powerful  semi-historical 
romance,  Der  Katzensteg  (The  Cat's  Bridge), 
produced  his  first  play,  Die  Ehre  (Honour). 
From  these  two  events  the  new  developments 
in  the  German  theatre  took  their  origin.  Since 


238  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

then  these  writers,  who  were  its  first  sponsors, 
have  gone  far  apart.  Sudermann,  whose 
precise,  clear-cut  talent  was  trained  by  the 
French  realists,  has  passed  from  one  popular 
success  to  the  other ;  he  has  enriched  the 
stage  with  a  large  repertory  of  effective  pieces, 
which,  after  the  manner  of  Dumas  fils,  have  all 
behind  them  some  dominating  idea  ;  and  are, 
moreover,  abundantly  supplied  with  telling 
dramatic  situations  and  contrasting,  effective 
characters.  But  as  the  years  have  moved  on, 
German  criticism  has  grown  restive  under  the 
monotony  of  the  Sudermann  type  of  play, 
which  has  tended,  like  the  analogous  drama  in 
France,  to  become  stereotyped.  Even  when 
Sudermann  turned  away  from  realistic  plays 
of  every  day — as  in  his  Johannes,  for  instance, 
in  which  he  challenged  a  comparison  with 
Hebbel  on  that  writer's  own  ground  of  psy- 
chological tragedy ;  or  again  in  Die  drei 
Reiherfedern  (The  Three  Heron's  Feathers), 
where  he  experimented  with  the  dramatic 
"  Marchen,"  or  in  one  of  his  latest  dramas,  Der 
Bettler  von  Syrakus  (The  Beggar  of  Syracuse], 
a  poetic  drama  playing  in  a  semi-classical 
milieu,  such  as  in  earlier  days  had  been  a 
favourite  with  the  imitators  of  Schiller — in  all 
these  attempts  to  leave  the  path  that  had 


THE    LAST   PHASE  239 

brought  him  fame,  Sudermann  has  only 
revealed  his  limitations.  One  feels  that  it  is 
always  the  same  Sudermann — the  Sudermann 
of  quite  modern  ideas  and  modern  social 
problems — under  an  incongruous  disguise. 
His  best  works  remain  Die  Ehre,  Sodoms  Ende, 
Heimat,  Das  Gluck  im  Winkel  and  similar 
pieces  ;  and  it  is  but  fair  to  say  that,  besides 
the  theatrical  effectiveness  which  modern 
critics  are  inclined  to  look  on  with  suspicion, 
these  plays  do  possess  an  intrinsic  poetic  value 
which  was  a  distinct  gain  to  the  theatre.  In 
fiction,  Sudermann  has  in  later  years  turned  to 
more  ambitious  themes  than  the  elegiac  novel 
of  his  youth  which  has  just  been  mentioned  ; 
in  Es  war  and  Das  hohe  Lied  the  dominant 
influence  of  French  models,  and  a  pure 
outwardness  of  conflict  which  degenerates 
occasionally  into  mere  sensational  melodrama, 
make  them  somewhat  questionable  contri- 
butions to  German  prose  literature. 

It  is  much  harder  to  arrive  at  a  definite 
judgment  on  Gerhart  Hauptmann.  The  diffi- 
culty in  his  case  is  the  extraordinarily  Protean 
nature  of  his  talent.  He  has  tried  his  hand 
at  more  varied  forms  of  literary  and,  more 
particularly,  of  dramatic  work  than  any  other 
writer  of  his  time.  He  makes  the  impression 


240     THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

of  being  a  man  easily  influenced  by  outward 
impressions,  and  ready  to  adapt  himself  to  these 
impressions  in  a  manner  which  is  incompatible 
with  a  strong  personality.  He  began,  for 
instance,  by  writing  ultra-realistic  dramas  ; 
then  he  fell,  together  with  his  contempor- 
aries, under  the  influence  of  the  Scandi- 
navians, and  as  a  result  produced  that  most 
powerful  drama  of  the  first  phase  of  the 
literary  revival,  Die  Weber  (The  Weavers}. 
Next  he  came  under  the  spell  of  the  new 
mysticism  which  had  begun  to  sap  the  roots 
of  realism  all  over  the  Continent.  In  Hanneles 
Himmelfahrt,  he  created  a  modern  fairy 
drama  in  which  an  extreme,  almost  repellant, 
realism  is  combined  with  imaginative  fancy  of 
the  utmost  delicacy.  With  Die  versunkene 
Glocke  (The  Sunken  Bell)  he  gave  himself  up 
wholly  to  allegorical  poetry,  only  to  return 
again  to  a  firmer  and  more  solid  realistic  basis 
in  Fuhrmann  Henschel  and  Rose  Bernd.  Since 
these  days  Hauptmann  has  gone  his  own 
way,  always  eluding  just  those  lines  his 
critics  expect  him  to  follow,  always  keenly 
alive  to  the  movement  of  ideas  ;  but  not,  it 
must  be  frankly  admitted,  with  the  success 
that  attended  some  of  his  earlier  productions. 
It  is  very  doubtful,  indeed,  whether  the 


THE   LAST   PHASE  241 

dramatic  production  of  Hauptmann's  later 
years  will  leave  any  mark  at  all  in  the  history 
of  the  German  drama.  In  recent  years  he 
has  turned  to  the  novel ;  his  strange  story  of 
Christ  in  the  modern  world,  Emanuel  Quint, 
is  full  of  undeniable  imaginative  power ;  but 
his  latest  novel,  Atlantis,  awakens  grave 
doubts  as  to  its  author's  critical  acumen 
where  his  own  work  is  concerned. 

It  is  impossible,  and  would  hardly  be 
profitable  here,  to  attempt  to  follow  in  all  its 
intricacies,  the  literary  movement  of  which, 
in  the  drama,  Sudermann  and  Hauptmann 
are  the  best  known  representatives ;  it  is 
enough  to  say  that  literature  has  not  stood 
still.  Constant  experimenting  and  unlimited 
receptivity,  have  been  the  notes  of  the  German 
theatre  in  this  time  ;  there  has  been  no  move- 
ment, however  successful  or  however  abortive, 
in  the  contemporary  European  drama  which 
has  not  found  an  echo  on  the  German  stage ; 
and  some  of  the  most  striking  innovations  are 
of  German  origin.  Only  for  a  brief  period  did 
the  German  drama  remain  at  the  standpoint 
of  thorough-going  realism  ;  the  mystic,  the 
the  allegorical,  the  symbolical  soon  invaded 
and  took  possession  of  it.  In  Austria,  which 
had  never  fallen  so  completely  under  the 

Q 


242  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

realistic  spell  as  North  Germany,  the  imagina- 
tive idealism  was  quickest  to  assert  itself. 
Here  men  of  whom  Arthur  Schnitzler  is  a 
typical  example,  kept,  in  the  main,  to  the 
traditions  of  the  French  theatre  ;  but  Austria 
can  also  point  to  a  poetic  drama,  of  which 
the  most  distinguished  representative  at  pre- 
sent is  Hugo  von  Hofmannsthal — a  drama 
worthy  of  a  nation  amongst  whom  Grillparzer 
is  still  a  power.  Perhaps  the  most  interesting 
form  which  this  new  Romantic  drama  has 
taken,  is  the  resuscitation  of  antique  tragedy 
— a  resuscitation  in  its  way  not  unsimilar  to 
that  of  the  French  seventeenth  century — in 
which  the  heroic  figures  of  antiquity  are 
made  to  appear,  not  as  statuesque  demigods, 
but  as  very  real  men  and  women  struggling 
with  passions  and  problems  familiar  to  us 
to-day.  For  the  present,  the  drama  seems  to 
have  definitely  broken  with  the  once  all- 
powerful  realism,  and  to  be  feeling  its  way 
back  to  that  domain  of  imaginative  freedom 
in  which  the  German  mind  has  been  always 
more  at  home. 

With  this  insistent  appeal  of  the  drama 
to  the  best  intellectual  classes  in  Germany 
has  gone  an  enormous  development  of  the 
German  theatre  as  an  institution.  Beginning 


THE    LAST   PHASE  243 

with  the  reforms  of  Richard  Wagner,  first 
set  before  an  international  public  at  Bayreuth, 
and  with  the  conscientious  reproductions  of 
classic  drama  under  the  Duke  of  Meiningen, 
the  theatre  in  Germany  has  progressed  from 
one  triumph  to  another,  until  now  with  the 
technical  achievement  of  the  "  Deutsche 
Theater  "  in  Berlin  and  of  the  great  Court 
Theatres  throughout  the  German-speaking 
area,  it  easily  holds  its  place  as  the  first  in 
Europe. 

Of  the  modern  novel  it  is  less  easy  to 
speak.  It  has  proved  itself  less  unwilling 
to  benefit  by  outside  influences ;  and  has 
fallen  successively  under  the  spell  of  French 
naturalism  and  of  Scandinavian  imagina- 
tive realism ;  above  all,  it  has  learned 
from  the  masters  of  the  Russian  novel, 
Dostoevsky  and  Tolstoi.  The  output  has 
been  enormous,  and  much  of  that  output 
has  been  undeservedly  swept  away  by  the 
advancing  tide.  We  are  not  even  sure  that 
those  authors  and  books  that  have  survived 
the  years,  have  always  been  the  most 
worthy  to  survive  ;  for  it  is  in  the  nature 
of  fiction,  even  in  a  land  like  Germany, 
which  endeavours  to  sift  carefully  the 
makers  of  literature  from  the  purveyors 


244   THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

of  the  circulating  library,  that  enormous 
editions  and  continual  popularity  have  gone, 
not  to  the  really  gifted,  but  rather  to  the 
skilful  imitators  and  popularisers  of  what 
the  more  original  spirits  have  initiated. 
In  the  early  period  Theodor  Fontane  was  a 
worthy  pioneer  of  the  modern  realistic 
novel  on  French  lines ;  and  his  Effi  Briest, 
at  least,  occupies  a  permanent  place  in  the 
fiction  of  this  time.  But  the  adventurous 
souls  who,  in  the  eighties,  sailed  out  on  to  the 
unknown  waters  of  a  new  literature,  icono- 
clastic realists,  who  refused  to  make  any 
concession  to  tradition,  have  been  rather  sub- 
merged by  the  later  movement.  It  is  too  soon 
to  attempt  to  adjudge  values  in  the  modern 
German  novel ;  but  we  are  inclined  to  think 
that  posterity  may  take  a  less  kindly  view  of 
idols  of  popular  taste  than  contemporary 
Germany  does,  and  will  no  doubt  draw  the 
line  that  separates  literature  from  what  is 
not  literature  a  little  higher  than  it  stands 
at  present.  But  the  fact  remains  that  the 
German  novel  of  to-day  does  show  much 
healthy  promise ;  and  men,  at  least,  like  the 
author  of  Buddenbrooks,  Thomas  Mann,  and 
one  or  two  women  writers,  will  not  be 
allowed  to  be  forgotten. 


THE   LAST   PHASE  245 

The  last  word  that  has  to  be  said  concerns 
the  lyric.  In  all  ages  of  German  literature 
the  lyric  is  the  supreme  test  of  vitality.  If 
there  is  a  living  lyric  poetry,  then  all  is  well ; 
for  the  lyric  is  the  quintessence  of  the  German 
literary  spirit.  And  the  best  testimony  to  the 
genuineness  and  power  of  the  literary  revival 
of  our  time  in  Germany  is  the  abundance  of 
original  lyric  poetry  it  has  produced.  Indeed, 
this  lyric  revival  is  the  most  encouraging 
sign  of  all ;  for  in  no  field  did  the  outlook 
seem  less  promising  for  the  young  reformers 
of  the  eighties  than  just  here.  Behind  them 
lay  an  enormous  body  of  lyric  poetry,  richer 
and  more  varied  than  any  other  lyric  in 
the  world.  The  poetry  of  Goethe  and  the 
great  classical  period  was,  as  it  still  is,  a 
power  in  German  hearts ;  and  that  of  the 
Romantic  era  shows  few  of  the  signs  of 
growing  out-of-date  which  so  soon  settled 
like  a  blight  on  Romantic  drama  and  novel. 
And  yet  in  spite  of  this  over-abundant  tradi- 
tion— in  spite  of  the  fact  that  lyric  poetry 
deals  with  a  comparatively  small  range  of 
emotions  which  are  practically  the  same 
in  all  ages ;  in  other  words,  that  it  had 
no  novelty  of  matter  to  offer — the  German 
lyric  of  our  time  has  struck  out  new  lines 


246  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

and  won  for  itself  a  "  place  in  the  sun." 
That,  it  seems  to  us,  is  the  most  promising 
symptom  of  the  new  movement  in  Germany ; 
and  we  are  inclined  to  attribute  a  higher 
place  to  the  genius  of  such  pioneers  of  a  quite 
modern  lyric  poetry  as  Detlev  von  Liliencron, 
Richard  Dehmel,  Friedrich  Nietzsche,  Stefan 
George,  and  a  host  of  lesser  singers, 
who  have  discovered  the  priceless  art  of 
looking  out  on  life  with  their  own  eyes,  of 
dispensing  with  the  support  of  tradition, 
than  to  the  novelists  and  dramatists  of  the 
period. 

At  the  same  time,  it  must  be  frankly  ad- 
mitted that  in  the  eyes  of  those  who  lived 
through  the  feverish  activity  and  the  bound- 
less hopes  of  the  later  eighties  and  the  early 
nineties  o.f  last  century,  the  new  literary 
movement  has  not  reached  the  heights  that 
were  hoped  for  it  in  those  years.  The 
failing — and  it  has  always  been  a  failing  in 
German  literary  activity — is  that  criticism 
and  theory  have  gone  in  advance  of  practice. 
While  with  other  peoples  the  poets  set  the 
norm,  it  is  more  frequently  the  case  that 
the  critics  do  so  here.  That  had  been  the 
case,  as  will  be  remembered,  in  the  early 
eighteenth  century ;  it  was  again  the  case 


THE    LAST   PHASE  247 

with  the  first  Romantic  School ;  and  it  is 
pre-eminently  true  of  this  last  phase.  Almost 
every  step  forward  which  the  new  literature 
has  taken,  has  been  preceded  by  a  theoretical 
pronouncement  on  the  part  of  sojne  school  or 
coterie.  The  inevitable  difficulty  when  the 
critics  have  the  power  and  precedence,  is  that 
poetry  has  either  to  become  a  pedant-ridden, 
artificial  product  of  theory ;  or  it  must  turn 
recalcitrant,  and  fight  against  the  restrictions 
imposed  upon  it  and  against  the  pedagogic 
intentions  of  its  would-be  masters.  In  either 
case  the  result  is  unsatisfying.  In  the 
eighteenth  century  and,  to  some  extent,  in 
the  Romantic  age,  the  critics  were  soon 
overridden  by  the  more  virile  literature ; 
but  the  present  age,  as  far  as  its  relations  to 
theory  are  concerned,  seems  never  to  have 
quite  freed  itself  from  its  leading-strings. 
At  least,  the  Messiah  has  not  yet  appeared 
either  in  the  drama  or  in  the  novel,  and 
the  rebellion  of  the  writers  of  the  day 
against  the  confines  erected  round  them 
has  rarely  been  accompanied  by  that  suc- 
cess which  alone  justifies  rebellion.  But 
there  have  been  other  gains  of  which  no 
one  dreamed  twenty  years  ago  ;  literature 
has  broadened  out  and  moved  forward, 


248  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

not  perhaps  as  it  was  expected  to  move, 
but,  all  the  same,  in  an  extremely  in- 
teresting way ;  and  the  flow  of  strong, 
earnest  talents  has  never  failed.  Above  all, 
no  one  twenty-five  years  ago  could  have 
foreseen  the  meaning  of  that  movement  of 
ideas  with  which  Nietszche  is  associated,  nor 
predicted  the  power  and  originality  of  the 
lyric  impulse. 


IT  is  not  easy  to  compress  in  a  brief  bibliographical  note 
any  very  serviceable  information  with  regard  to  the 
literature  of  German  literature.  On  no  subject  have  we 
so  many  excellent  handbooks  and  exhaustive  studies  as 
on  this.  The  reader  who  may  be  tempted  to  pursue  hia 
studies  further  in  English  books  is  referred  to  the  history 
of  German  literature  by  Professor  Kuno.  Francke,  of 
Harvard  University,  German  Literature  as  determined  by 
Social  Forces  (6th  edition,  1903),  or  to  the  present  writer's 
History  of  German  Literature  (Edinburgh,  1902).  In 
German  there  are  many  literary  histories  of  the  academic 
type,  accurate  and  solid,  but  not  always  characterised 
by  the  finer  literary  graces;  of  these  the  Geschichte  der 
deutschen  Literatur  by  Friedrich  Vogt  and  Max  Koch  (2nd 
edition  in  two  volumes,  1903),  will  be  found  most  generally 
serviceable ;  particularly  admirable  is  the  Geschichte  der 
Deutschen  Literatur  by  Wilhelm  Scherer  (10th  edition,  1905), 
\7hieh  corresponds  better  to  the  demands  we  like  to  make 
on  historians  of  literature.  Scherer's  History  is  also  to 
be  obtained  hi  English  translation  (new  edition,  1906). 
On  the  other  hand,  the  professedly  "  popular  "  histories  of 
German  literature  in  German  are  rather  to  be  avoided; 
and  the  brief  ones  are  rarely  satisfactory.  One  ex- 
ception to  the  former  class  ought  to  be  made  in  favour 
of  the  Deutsche  Literaturgeschichte  in  three  volumes 
(1907-11),  by  Alfred  Biese.  For  any  serious  study  of  the 
literature  the  invaluable  bibliographical  Grundriss  zur 
Geschichte  der  deutschen  Literatur  of  Karl  Goedeke  (2nd 
edition,  1884)  is  indispensable.  A  useful  bibliography  on 
249 


250       BIBLIOGRAPHICAL   NOTE 

a  smaller  scale  is  A.  Bartels'  Handbuch  zur  Geschichte  der 
deutschen  Literatur  (Leipzig,  1906). 

With  regard  to  the  history  of  individual  periods,  there 
is  little  of  a  sufficiently  general  character  to  be  mentioned 
here,  until  we  reach  the  eighteenth  century.  The  earlier 
periods  are  still  in  the  hands  of  the  academic  investigator, 
and  exhaustive  monographs  on  individual  poets  and 
periods  are  innumerable  ;  but  no  historian  has  yet  arisen 
to  give  us  a  wholly  satisfying  history  of  early  German 
literature.  And  this  is  more  emphatically  true  of  the 
extremely  confused  period  of  transition,  the  fifteenth, 
sixteenth,  and  seventeenth  centuries.  For  the  eighteenth 
century  a  study  of  Hermann  Hettner's  comparative  work 
( Literaturgeschichte  des  achtzehnten  Jahrhunderts,  Part  III. 
Deutsche  Literatur,  6th  ed.,  Brunswick,  1913)  is,  in  spite  of 
the  fact  that,  in  some  respects,  Hettner's  standpoint  has 
become  out-of-date,  still  indispensable ;  more  detailed, 
but  less  in  accordance  with  our  present-day  point  of  view 
is  Julian  Schmidt's  Geschichte  der  deutschen  Literatur  von 
Leipzig  bis  auf  unsere  Ze.it,  5  vols.  (Last  ed.,  1896.)  For 
the  nineteenth  century,  the  brilliant  and  suggestive  book 
by  Richard  M.  Meyer  (Die  deutsche  Literatur  des  19. 
Jahrhunderts,  popular  edition,  1912)  still  seems  to  us, 
in  spite  of  many  rivals,  the  best.  For  the  Romantic 
School,  R.  Haym's  epoch-making  book  (Die  Romantische 
Schule,  2nd  edition,  1906)  is  of  the  highest  value ;  while 
the  English  reader  will  find  much  that  is  suggestive  in  the 
volumes  of  the  Danish  critic,  Georg  Brandos'  Main 
Streams  in  European  Literature,  dealing  respectively  with 
the  Romantic  School  and  Young  Germany  (English  transla- 
tion, London,  1903  and  1905).  For  the  quite  modern 
period,  there  is  also  a  wide  selection,  the  last  and  one  of 
the  most  attractive  surveys  being  that  by  A.  Soergel, 
Deutsche  Dichtung  und  Dichter  der  Zeit  (Leipzig,  1911). 
Authoritative  monographs  on  the  greater  eighteenth- 
century  poets  are  F.  Muncker's  Klopstock  (Stuttgart, 
1888),  E,  Schmidt's  Leasing  (3rd  edition,  Berlin,  1912), 


BIBLIOGRAPHICAL   NOTE       251 

E.  Kuhnemann's  Herder  (2nd  edition,  Munich,  1912)j 
A.  Bielsohowsky's  Goethe  (25th  edition,  Munich,  1913), 
and  K.  Berger's  Schiller  (Munich,  1905  f.). 

Of  more  importance  than  books  about  German  literature 
is  the  literature  itself.  Anthologies  are  never  satisfactory 
things  at  the  best,  but  to  the  reader  who  will  accompany 
his  studies  with  samples,  TheOerman  Classics,  an  anthology 
edited  years  ago  by  Max  Miiller  to  provide  illustrative 
matter  to  Scherer's  book  (new  edition,  1906),  has  still  many 
good  points ;  there  is  also  an  Anthology  of  German  Litera- 
ture on  a  smaller  scale  by  Professor  Calvin  Thomas  (1910). 
Of  collections  of  German  classics  there  is  no  lack ;  and 
these  are  cheap  and  good.  For  the  earlier  period  the  needs 
of  the  general  reader  are  perhaps  best  met  by  the  series  of 
Deutsche  Klassiker  des  MittelaUers  (12  vols.),  Deutsche 
DichterdessechzehntenJahrhunderts  (18  vols.),  and  Deutsche 
Dichter  des  siebzehnten  Jahrhunderts  (15  vols.).  These 
series,  originally  edited  many  years  ago  by  F.  Pfeiffer, 
J.  Tittmann  and  K.  Goedeke,  are  kept,  where  new  editions 
have  been  called  for,  up  to  date.  The  literature  of  the 
Early  New  High  German  period  is,  in  great  part,  to  be 
found  in  the  publications  of  the  Literarische  Verein  of 
Stuttgart,  and  in  the  series  Literaturwerke  des  16.  und  17. 
Jahrhunderts,  edited  by  W.  Braune.  For  the  last  twti 
centuries  general  anthologies  are  less  practicable,  but  the 
Literaturdenkmale  des  18.  und  19.  Jahrhunderts  should  be 
mentioned  as  containing  muchthatisotherwiseinaccessible. 
For  the  entire  period  down  to  the  first  Romantic  School, 
however,  the  most  useful  collection  is  the  Deutsche  National- 
literatur,  planned  by  J.  Kurschner,  in  222  volumes  (1882- 
98).  Anthologies  of  lyric  poetry — and  here  the  anthology 
is  confessedly  in  place — have  been  extraordinarily  numer- 
ous of  late  in  Germany ;  we  would  especially  here  refer  to 
that  published  at  Oxford  (1912)  by  Professor  H.  G. 
Fiedler. 

Germany  is  fortunate  in  possessing  admirable  standard 
and  critical  editions  of  all  her  greater  poets.  Mention 


may  be  made  here  of  that  of  Herder's  works  by  B.  Suphan 
(33  vols.,  Weimar,  1877  ff.) ;  of  Lessing's  by  F.  Muncker  (22 
vols.,  Stuttgart,  1886  ff.) ;  of  Wieland's,  at  present  being 
published  by  the  Prussian  Academy  ;  of  Goethe's  in  the 
magnificent  Weimar  edition  (Weimar,  1887  ff.),  °f  which 
over  100  volumes  have  appeared ;  and  of  Schiller's,  by 
EL  Goedeke,  15  vols.,  Stuttgart,  1867  ff.)-  For  practical 
use  the  English  reader  will  find  the  latest  editions  of 
Goethe  and  Schiller,  published  by  Cotta  in  Stuttgart,  most 
serviceable.  For  the  more  modern  poets,  the  choice  is 
wider,  and  the  German  publishing  houses  have  in  recent 
years  vied  with  each  other  in  producing  attractive 
editions. 


INDEX 


Alexander,  Lay  of,  18 
Alexis,  W.  (W.  Haring),  212 
Angelus  Silesiua  (J.  Sckeffler), 

44 

Anzengruber,  L.,  210,  237 
Arndt,  E.  M.,  151 
Arnim,  L.  A.  von,  150,  154 
Arthurian  epics,  21-25,  28 
Asiatiache  Baniae,  Diet  71 
Ayrenhoff,  C.  H.  von,  176 
Ayrer,  J.,  59 

Ballad  poetry,  60,  94,  168 
Barbarossa     (Frederick     I.), 

20,  53 

Bauernfeld,  E.  von,  180 
Beast  epic  and  fable,  16,  35 
Benedix,  It.,  219 
Bible,  Translations  of  the,  43; 

Luther's,  38,  45,  48 
Birck,  S.,  55 
Bodenstedt,  F.,  227 
Bodmer,  J.  J.,  83 
Boehme,  J.,  43 
Borne,  L.,   196 
Brant,  S.,  35 
Breitinger,  J.  J.,  83 
Brentano,  C.,   150,  154-156 
Brockes,  B.  A.,  75 
Burger,  G.  A.,  94 


Ckamisso,  A.  von,  156 


253 


Charles   the   Great   (Charle- 
magne), 14-16 
Claudius,  M.,  94 
Collin,  H.  J.  von,  176 
Court  epic,  21-25,  28 
Crusades,  The,  17,  24,  33 

Dach,  S.,  65 
Dahn,  F.,  213 
Dehmel,  R.,  246 
Dingelstedt,  F.,  200 
Droste-Hulshoff,  A.  von,  203 
Diirer,  A.,  56 

Ebers,  G.,  213 
Ebner-Eschenbach,  M.   von, 

218 

Ecbasis  captivi,   15 
Eckhart,  Meister,  42 
Eichendorff,  J.  von,  157 
Ekkehard  (of  St.  Gall),  15 
English  actors  in  Germany, 

59,  63 
Eulenspiegel,  Till,  36 

Fastnachtsspiele,  54,  57 
Fate  Tragedy,  153,   176 
Faust   (Volksbuch),   61 
Fichte,  J.  G.,  184 
Fischart,   J.,   51-53 
Fleming,    P.,   65 
Fontane,  T.,  244 


254 


INDEX 


Fouque",  F.  de  la  Mctte,  161 
Franco-German     War,     202, 

208,  233 
Frederick  the  Great,  77,  80, 

85 

Freidank,  34 
Freiligrath,  F.,  200 
French  Revolution,  126,  148  ; 

of    1830,    188,    194;    of 

1848,  171,  201,  204 
Freytag,  G.,  205-208,  212 
Frischlin,  P.  N.,  55 

Geibel,  E.,  200,  202,  227 
Geiler,   J.,   42 
Gellert,  C.  F.,  84 
Gengenbach,  P.,  55 
George,  S.,  246 
Gerhardt,  P.,  67 
Gerstenberg,  H.  W.  von,  98 
Gleim,  J.  W.  L.,  85 
Gorres,  J.  J.  von,  150 
Goethe,  J.   W.    von,   95-97, 

101,  108,  123-142 
Gothic  Bible,  The,  12 
Gottfried  von  Strassburg,  21, 

25 

Gotthelf,  J.  (A.  Bitzius),  209 
Gottinger  Dichterbund,  The, 

93-95 

Gottsched,  J.  C.,  73,  78,  83 
Gottsched,  L.  A.,  75 
Grabbe,  C.  D.,   174 
Grillparzer,  F.,   176-179 
Grimm,  J.  and  W.,  150 
Grimmelshausen,  J.  J.  C.  von, 

68 

Groth,    K.,    211 
Gryphius,  A.,  66 
Gudrun,  28 
Gunther,  J.  C.,  73 
Gutzkow,  K.,  197,  204 


Hagedorn,  F.  von,  76 
Halm,  F.,  (E.  J.  von  Mtinch- 

Bellinghausen),  180 
Hamann,  J.  G.,  92 
Hamerling,   R.,   228 
Hartmann  von  Aue,  21-23 
Hartmann,  E.  von,  232 
Hauff,    W.,    165 
Hauptmann,  G.,  237 
Hebbel,  C.  F.,  162,  220-225 
Hegel,  G.  W.  F.,  171,  184, 

228 
Heidelberg    Romanticists, 

The,  148-150 

Heine,  H.,  159,  183,  189-196 
Heinrich    Julius    (Duke    of 

Brunswick),  59 
Heinse,  J.  J.,  104 
Heldenbuch,  Das,  29 
Hdiand,  Der,  13 
Herder,  J.  F.,  92 
Herwegh,  G.,  200 
Herzog  Ernst,    18 
Heyse,  P.,  207,  216 
Hildebrandslied,    Das,    13 
Hoffmann,  E.  T.  A.,  162-164 
Hoffmann  von  Fallersleben, 

A.   H.,   200 
Hofmann     von     Hofmanns- 

waldau,  C.  H.  von,  70 
Hofmannsthal,  H.  von,  242 
Hohenstaufen  Emperors,  19, 

173 

Holderlin,  F.,   172 
Holty,  L.  H.  G.,  94 
Humanism,    39 
Hutten,  U.  von,  51 
Hymn,  The  Protestant,  43-45, 

67 

Iffland,  A.  W.,  106 
Immermann,  K.,  181,  198 


INDEX 


255 


Jacobi,  F.  H.,  105 
Johanna,  Pope,  54 

Kant,  I.,  115 

Keller,  G.,  170,  213-215 

Kerner,   J.,    168 

Kleist,  E.  C.  von,  86 

Kleist,  H.  von,  123,  151 

Klinger,  M.  von,  98,  106 

KJopstock,  F.  G.,  83-85,  90, 

93 

Konig  Bother,  18 
Konrad  von  Wiirzburg,  28 
Korner,  T.,  151 
Kotzebue,  A.  von,  107 

Laube,  H.,  197 
Leibniz,  G.  W.,  81,  115,  128 
Lenau,  N.,  170-173 
Lenz,  J.  M.  B.,  98 
Leasing,  G.  E.,  81,  86-89,  103 
Leuthold,  H.,  227 
Liliencron,  D.  von,  246 
Lingg,  H.,  227 
Literary  Societies,  63. 
Logau,  F.  von,  65 
Lohenstein,  D.  C.  von,  70 
Ludwig,  O.,  210,  224-226 
Luther,  M.,  38,  44-49 

Mann,  T.,   244 
Manuel,    N.,    55 
Marschner,  H.,  153 
Maximilian,  I.,  35 
Meier  Helmbrecht,   28 
Meistergesang,  35,  57 
Meyer,  C.  F.,  217 
Migrations    (Volkerwander- 

ung),  17,  21 
Minnesang,    19,   29-32 
Mommsen,   T.,    230 
Morike,  E.,  169 


Moritz,  K.  P.,  104 
Moscherosch,  J.  M.,  68 
Miiller,  F.  (Maler  Muller),  99 
Mttller,  W.,   158 
Munich  School,  226-229 
Murner,  T.,   49 
Mysticism,   18,  41 

National  Epic,  21,  26-29 
Neidhart  von  Reuental,  34 
Nestroy,   J.,    180 
Nibdungenlied,   Das,    26-28 
Nietzsche,   F.,   235,  246 
Novalis,  F.  (F.  von  Harden- 
berg),  147 

Opitz,  M.,  64,  70 
Otfrid,  12 

Pauli,  J.,  36 
Platen-Hallermunde,  A.  von* 

181-184 
Political  lyric,   199-222 

Rabener,  G.  W.,  84 
Raimund,  F.,  180 
Rainier,  K.  W.,  86 
Ranke,  L.  von,  230 
Raupach,  E.,  174 
Rationalism(  Enlightenment), 

,79,  89,  115,  141 
Rebhun,  P.,  55 
Beinke  de  Vos,  35 
Reuter,  F.,  210-212 
Richter,  J.  P.  F.,  104 
Riehl,  W.  H.,  228 
Rosegger,   P.,   210 
Riicker,  F.,  160 
Euodlieb,  15 

Saar,  F.  von,  218 
Sachs,  H.,  55-58 


256 


INDEX 


Saxon  Emperors,  The,  14,  16 
Schack,  A.  F.  von,  227 
Scheffel,  J.  V.  von,  212,  228 
Schelling,  F.  W.  J.  von,  184 
Schenkendorf,  M.  von,  151 
Schiller,  J.   F.   von,   99-101, 

109-111,  116,  118-123 
Schlegel,  A.  W.  von,  147 
Schlegel,  F.  von,  146 
Schlegel,  J.  K,  84 
Schnitzler,  A.,  242 
Schopenhauer,  A.,  171,  185, 

228,  233 
Schwab,  G.,  168 
Seuse,  H.,  42 

Shakespeare,  W.,  66,  91,  148 
Silesian  School,  First,  64-66  ; 

Second,  70 
Spec,  F.  von,  44 
Spielhagen,  F.,  204 
Spielleute,  17,  18 
Stifter,  A.,  210 
Stolberg,  C.  and  F.  L.  zu,  94 
Storm,  T.,  215 
Strachwitz,  M.  von,  203 
Sudennann,  H.,  237 

Tauler,  J.,  42 
Thcophilus,  54 


Thirty  Years'  War,  The,  60, 

63 

Thomasius,  C.,  115 
Tieck,  L.,  146 

Uhland,  L.,  167 
Ulphilaa  (Wulfila),  12 

Volksbucher,  36,  60 
Volkslieder,  30,  35,  60,  139 
Voss,  J.  H.,  94 

Wagner,  H.  L.,  98 
Wagner,  R.,  220,  233 
Waltharius,  Lay  of,  15 
Walther  von  der  Vogelweide, 

29-32 

Werner,  Z.,  152 
Wickram,  J.,  36 
Wieland,  C.  M.,  90 
Wildenbruch,  E.  von,  234, 

236 

Winkelmann,  J.  J.,  78,  87 
Wolff,  C.  von,  115 
Wolfram    von    Eschenbach, 

21,  23-25 

SToung  Germany,  145,  188- 
199 


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